Council lacks balance.(Guest Editorial)

Soon after taking office, President George W. Bush appointed the Council on Bioethics to help guide him and the nation through the rocky moral terrain that new biomedical technologies require Americans to navigate. Sadly, in recent months, the council seems to have been put in the service of furthering the President's political agenda. The administration, which has come under attack for politicizing science, is doing the same thing with respect to bioethics.

In March, the White House ejected two council members: Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Ph.D., a world-renowned biologist, and William F. May. Ph.D., a widely respected theologian. They were replaced with three new members: Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, Peter A. Lawler, Ph.D., and Diana J. Schaub, Ph.D. The new appointees significantly shifted what was already a somewhat conservative council further to the right.

Groups like the bioethics council are intended as tools to educate the public and Congress. So it is important that there not be too great a skew in the range of opinion represented. The latest round of appointments got rid of people who did not echo the neoconservative views of Dr. Leon R. Kass, the council's chairman, and the majority of the council members, and replaced them with three people who are much more closely aligned with the conservative majority. While the council has had little positive to say about cloning, it is slowly evolving into a council of clones.

The new people have evinced strong conservative opinions but have written little that distinguishes them as appropriate for council membership. Not only is that not the best the nation deserves for bioethics appointments, it's not even best that can be found among right-wing thinkers on bioethics.

Not only should the composition of the council be broadened, the subjects that the council chooses to discuss also need to be rethought. As new technologies emerge--whether in reproductive medicine, psychiatry, or pharmacology--many people are made uncomfortable about what the particular technology can do, what it can't do, and what might happen.

It is important that the council not just try to "crystal ball" the ethics of emerging technologies. I would like to see them looking at topics like genetic testing, the for-profit tissue business, and biobanking, all of which are here now.

I'd also like to see the council talk about international research conducted by U.S. and European drug companies. Is it possible to do experiments on desperately poor and often illiterate people? Whose rules do you follow regarding ...