Obama Plans to Replace Bush’s Bioethics Panel

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/politics/18ethics.html?_r=1&ref=us

Obama Plans to Replace Bush’s Bioethics Panel

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: June 17, 2009


Members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were told by the White House last week that their services were no longer needed and were asked to cancel a planned meeting, a council staff member said Wednesday.

The council was disbanded because it was designed by the Bush administration to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group” that favored discussion over developing a shared consensus, said Reid Cherlin, a White House press officer.

President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,” Mr. Cherlin said.

The council was appointed by President George W. Bush in November 2001, in the wake of his decision to let government-financed scientists begin research with human stem cells, but only with existing cell cultures.

snip//

Dr. Alta Charo, an ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, said that much of the Bush council’s work “seemed more like a public debating society” and that a new commission should focus on helping the government form ethically defensible policy.

A commission of this kind, Dr. Charo said, “lets the president react judiciously to rapid and often startling changes in the scientific landscape.”

[Fovea]

1. Yes!

Eight years of inertia, shown the door.