What guidance does the Constitution offer us in considering the ethical dilemmas posed by biotechnology? Drawing upon Madison, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Diana Schaub examines four constitutional clauses that bear on bioethics. She reveals that our contemporary dilemmas and debates--about the status of the human embryo, for instance, or the position of science within a democratic polity--are not entirely novel. Although our modern technological possibilities are unprecedented, the principles of the Constitution can and should continue to light our way and, in certain key respects, set restraints upon our actions.

Diana J. Schaub is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Loyola College in Maryland. From 1994 to 1995, she was the postdoctoral fellow of the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University. In 2001, she was the recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters. Ms. Schaub has taught at the University of Michigan at Dearborn and served as assistant editor of The National Interest. She is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s "Persian Letters" (1995), along with a number of book chapters and articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. Ms. Schaub’s work also appears in the New Criterion, The Public Interest, and The American Enterprise.