March 26, 2009
(Garrison, NY) President’s Council on Bioethics members Gilbert Meilaender, Ph.D., and Paul McHugh, M.D., and eight of the other 18 Council members take issue with President Barack Obama’s recent executive order removing restrictions on federal funding of research on embryonic stem cell lines in a commentary in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum
. Council chairman Edmund Pellegrino, M.D. writes a separate personal statement.
The commentary raises three concerns:
The policy under President Bush was inaccurately characterized. While President Obama characterized his action as “`lift[ing] the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research’,” the authors write, the policy under President Bush “did not ban federal funding of embryonic stem cell research; rather, for the first time, it provided and endorsed such funding (as long as the stem cell lines had been derived prior to that date). The aim of this policy was not to shackle scientific research but to find a way to reconcile the need for research with the moral concerns people have.”
President Bush’s policy was advancing research within ethical norms more effectively than President Obama’s will. The commentary asserts that the policy under president Bush was well on its way to “advancing biomedical science and upholding ethical norms,” two goals outlined in the 2005 Council white paper titled Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells. Since then, researchers have made progress on alternative methods of obtaining stem cells, particularly in reprogramming somatic cells in order to restore them to a pluripotent condition. “With respect to the progress that had been made in reconciling the needs of research and the moral concerns of many Americans, we can only judge, therefore, that the president’s action has taken a step backward, and we regret that,” they write.
The risk of reproductive cloning still must be addressed. Finally, the authors offer what they say is needed clarification on President Obama’s promise to “ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction.” They write that the president’s announced policy would permit federal funding of research not only on stem cell lines derived from IVF embryos, “but also on lines derived from created and/or cloned embryos. In the latter two cases, we would be producing embryos simply in order to use them for our purposes.” Furthermore, to prevent such cloned embryos from being used reproductively, “the government would find itself in the unsavory position of designating a class of embryos that it would be a felony not to destroy,” they conclude.
In a separate statement, Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., chairman of the Council, writes, “As an individual council member, speaking for myself and not the President’s Council on Bioethics, I support the substance of the objections of some council members to recent relaxation of existing policies regarding human embryonic stem cell research. Ethically, I cannot support any policy permitting deliberate production and/or destruction of a human fetus or embryo for any purpose, scientific or therapeutic.”
The eight other Council members who signed the commentary are:
Benjamin Carson, M.D.
Nicholas Eberstadt, Ph.D.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Ph.D.
Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, Dr. Phil.
William Hurlbut, M.D.
Donald Landry, M.D., Ph.D.
Peter Lawler, Ph.D.
Diana Schaub, Ph.D.
Contact: Michael Turton, Communications Associate,
845-424-4040 Ext 242, turtonm@thehastingscenter.org