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President George W. Bush made two announcements in his televised speech on August 9, 2001. First, he would permit federal funding for experiments on stem cells derived from human embryos, but only on cells derived from embryos already killed by August 9. Second, he would appoint a Presidential Advisory Council on Bioethics, led by Leon Kass, to review this and other issues.

Longtime professor on the University of Chicago's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, Kass is an M.D. with a Ph.D. in biochemistry who has a background in National Institutes of Health research. He was a founding member of the board of the Hastings Center, the nation's premier bioethics think tank. I met with Kass at his American Enterprise Institute office in Washington. (Kass noted that his comments do not reflect the position of the federal government.)

Last August, before that fateful day September 11, the biggest issue in American public and political life was bioethics. And people were saying that the defining issue of the Bush presidency would be the President's view on embryo stem cell experiments. It's hard now to remember the context in which the President's televised speech to the nation, on August 9, was focused not on Al Qaeda but on embryos. In that speech he said he would establish an advisory council on bioethics, and he named you as its chair. That raised huge expectations for many of us, as we see these issues as the most important challenges facing the human race. Tell me how you see the potential of the council, its task, and your own opportunity as the one who was named to lead it.

I do think that the biological revolution, of which we have seen only the very earliest stages, is a matter of momentous and lasting importance. Extraordinary powers are being gathered to intervene in the bodies and minds of human beings. These powers were sought initially for the laudable purposes of healing disease and relieving suffering. But they also force us to consider, in the most profound way, the basic elements of our humanity and what it means to live a human life. They can make inheritable changes in human nature. They can intervene in all manner of human activities, they touch birth, they touch death, they touch questions of bodily integrity as one moves organs around or implants other things in the human body.

And it seems to me we stand at a critical point. In a way, it is given to this generation to decide whether we can use these powers for their limited goods and shape them to ends that contribute to human flourishing, or whether these powers will be used increasingly to push us down the road to a "Brave New World" in which certain humanitarian goals are realized but only at the cost of the things that make human life really worth living?

Tell me about the Council, and how you see its work.

I've thought that about these matters for more than 30 years. I do think that President Bush had an intimation that as he sought to resolve the stem cell issue he was discovering something far bigger. The fact that he did take so long to deliberate about that question shows it was not just a political decision on his part. He was seeking to do the right thing, and he found what is for him a moral solution to a difficult dilemma. But I think he understood that this was just the tip of the iceberg of the whole set of questions and challenges that were coming.

And in the mandate that has been given to the Council by the White House, to advise the President in the difficult decisions that he may have to make in this area, our first task is to do fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance of these advances in biomedical science and technology. Not just to pronounce them good, bad, or indifferent. Not to say "Are you for it or against it?" But at least to make vivid to everybody as best we can what it actually means to acquire the power to create human life in a laboratory or intervene in the human genome, or to move body parts around or to put computer chips in the human brain. These are powers which we acquire, admittedly, to begin with, for humanitarian ends, but to have those powers in human hands is already to change the world—apart from the uses that will follow. And our first task is to try to think that through.

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May (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46