Comment; science fiction.(bioethics)(The Talk of the Town)

The future of the life sciences in America may depend, in some small part, on the opinions of a bioethicist named Dr. Leon R. Kass. Kass, who was trained as a physician, is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, on leave from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. He has devoted a book to "eating and the perfecting of our nature," and has contributed to books with titles like "The Neoconservative Imagination." In August, President Bush appointed him chairman of the new National Bioethics Commission, which the President has asked to be "the conscience of our country" and be his guide on all ethical matters relating to biomedical advances.

At the commission's first meeting, the other week in Washington, Kass opened a discussion not with facts but with fiction. He talked about Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale "The Birthmark," in which a brilliant scientist marries a woman whose extraordinary beauty is marred only by a blemish on her cheek and becomes obsessed with eliminating the imperfection. The story has all the gothic conventions: bubbling beakers, arcane tomes, elixirs of immortality, a stunted, apelike assistant. In the end, the scientist's treatment cures the blemish but kills the wife.

Using literature to warn against the scientific search for perfection is a hallmark of Kass's approach to bioethics. (Hawthorne, Homer, and Huxley are among his touchstones.) So is a reflexive suspicion toward the enterprise of biotechnology. In a series of essays published in the nineteen-seventies, Kass opposed what is now the commonplace practice of in-vitro fertilization. He worried that it could erode traditional marriage and create a baby market, and that children conceived by the process would be stigmatized. (He has since dropped the subject.) Last summer, Kass came to public notice when he advised President Bush on his decision to prohibit the creation of any new stem-cell lines derived from human embryos. Now Kass's commission is deliberating stem-cell research as the Senate begins debate on several bills on human cloning.

There are two types of human cloning, popularly called reproductive and therapeutic. In both types, a nucleus from a cell is inserted into an unfertilized egg, and the egg takes on that cell's genetic characteristics. In reproductive cloning, the manipulated egg would grow to be a baby that is a genetic copy of the donor. In therapeutic cloning, the manipulated egg grows into a microscopic clump, which provides primitive stem cells, and the process is terminated. Cloned stem cells may one day provide treatments for scores of currently incurable diseases, including juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and spinal-cord paralysis. As the Kass commission met, the National Academy of Sciences, the most august research organization in American science -- and one that was also created to advise the federal government -- issued a report that called for a ban on reproductive cloning but reaffirmed its support for research on therapeutic cloning.

Unfortunately, the ...