Advice and non-consent

Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, is shrill.

IT has been weeks since President Bush's State of the Union speech, and I have not heard any outcry over his policy statement on cloning: "Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms." I can only guess that this means the public doesn't care, or doesn't understand what Mr. Bush means by this, or agrees with his nonsensical concept of what "human" means, or that somehow the stem cell scandal in South Korea has led to widespread agreement that we should just give up on such research. Any of these possibilities would be a mistake, not just for American science, but for the very human life the president seeks to protect.

Calling human cloning in all its forms an "egregious abuse" is a serious mischaracterization. This makes it sound as if the medical community is out there cloning people, which is simply not true. The phrase "in all of its forms" is code, a way of conflating very different things: reproductive cloning and biomedical cloning.

The volatile issue has been debated again and again, and the president's own largely conservative Bioethics Council (of which I am a member) in 2002 made a big distinction between the two forms of cloning. We voted unanimously to ban reproductive cloning — the kind of cloning that seeks to replicate a human being. We cited many reasons, from biomedical risk to religious concerns to the flat-out weirdness of the idea. But in fact human cloning has not been attempted, nor is it in the works; so it's a theoretical ban in the first place, like banning marriage between robots.

At the same time, the council had differing views on biomedical cloning, including stem cell research. Seven of the 17 voting members voted to allow scientists to proceed with the practice, pending regulations, while three more voted for a moratorium until such regulations were written. Thus, the majority, 10 of the 17, did not call for a ban on biomedical cloning — and this was our advice to the president. Obviously, he ignored it.

Yes, he tends to do that.

Why do scientists and other experts of good faith continue to give this administration cover by continuing to be members of Bush's various "advisory councils," when politics trump "advice" everytime?