BOOK FORUM
Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President's Council on Bioethics
Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Unedited Transcript

Agenda:

3:45 p.m.	Registration
4:00	Discussants:	Charles Murray, AEI
		William A. Galston, University of Maryland
		Diana Schaub, Loyola College of Maryland
		J. Bottum, Weekly Standard
	Response:	Leon Kass, AEI and the President's Council on Bioethics
	Moderator:	Tony Snow, Fox News
6:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Well, we certainly have a dignified audience, as well as a dignified panel. It's wonderful to see you all here today. Let me just give you a sense of the order-of-battle, as it were. What we're going to do is to have everybody up here make some remarks, then Leon will remove the spears and offer a few utterances of his own. Then we're going to let them mix it up a bit and take questions from the audience. We've got this slated for about two hours and we'll try to try to keep it more or less to time.

I'm Tony Snow, I'm the host of "Fox News Sunday with Tony Snow," on Fox Broadcast news and also, "Weekend Live with Tony Snow." The glory of Fox is they believe in branding by host name, so. That's about all you need to know about me.

Now, let me talk a little bit about the panelists we have and then I will introduce them in order. What's going to happen is, Leon Kass, first, is going to give you a summary of the President's Report on the Council on Bioethics Report. That, thereby, eliminates the perilous act of having me summarize it. And then we will proceed to remarks from the panel.

Let me introduce, from the end, Joseph Bottum, is the books and arts editor of the Weekly Standard; also is the poetry editor for First Things; and hosts the "Book Talk," a weekly radio program syndicated to more than 30 stations around the country; and if he's really smart, it will then become "Book Talk with Joedy Bottum." His writing has appeared just about everywhere and his latest book, "The Fall and Other Poems" has recently been issued by Saint Augustine's Press.

Then we have next to him Bill Galston, William A. Galston is the Saul Stern Professor of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland; also is director of the University's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information in Research on Civic Learning and Engagement--the reason they have that tortuous title is so that the acronym can be CIRCLE--t focuses on civic live of America's young people. He served for two years as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy. He's well known not only for his wit, but for his civility and is famously loved by people all over the ideological spectrum, which is almost unheard of in Washington. Congratulations on that.

Sitting next to him is Diana Schaub, who is Associate Professor and chairs the Department of Political Science at Loyola College in Maryland from '94 to '95; she was a post archial fellow in the program on constitutional government at Harvard University; in 2001, she was the recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters; she has taught at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, and has served as Assistant Editor at The National Interest; and she also has a series of books that you can read about; I'm trying not to belabor these too much.

Leon Kass is the Hertog Fellow at AEI, chair of the President's Council on Bioethics and Addie Clark Harding Professor on the Committee on Social Thoughts at the University of Chicago, a nationally renown bioethicist and one of the reasons we're here because he helped chair the deliberations that led to the production of this, "Human Cloning and Human Dignity," which very conveniently can be purchased just outside these doors for a nominal fee.

And, finally, sitting next to me is Charles Murray, Senior Fellow at AEI, political scientist by training; writes about social policy. Perhaps, you've heard of that. His major book, called "Losing Ground: American Social Policy," "In Pursuit of Happiness in Good Government," "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," and "What it Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation." And, as promised, now Leon Kass will first open today's program by talking about the major recommendations in this book and then the conversation will commence.

DR. KASS: Thanks very much, Tony, and welcome to all of you.

For the first six months of this year, the President's Council on Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, human significance of human cloning, in order to advise President Bush on what to do about it. And the report "Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry," was issued in July and a handsome paperback edition has just been published by Public Affairs.

Among the charges to the President's Council on Bioethics, were the following: To provide a forum for the national discussion of bioethical issues and to facilitate a greater understanding of bioethical issues. And our report, in addition to providing recommendations of policy was intended to serve both of these purposes.

The publication of this volume by Public Affairs, the convening of this book forum, are also in the spirit of helping us to perform that part of our mission and we're very grateful to Paul Golub of Public Affairs, to Christian Youth, and AEI, and to my fellow panelists to help us perform this work.

I want to summarize the contents of the report in five points.

First, the context for taking up the subject of human cloning. The Council sought to examine this subject in full by considering the human goods that cloning might serve or endanger, not just whether the technique is feasible or safe. And we sought to take up cloning in the context of the impact of growing biotechnical powers over human life and their effect on human procreation, on the goals and limits of biomedical science, and on the meaning on the activity of healing.

The first important thing is to put cloning in its place, both humanly speaking and, also, in the context of the growing biotechnical powers now gathering for manipulating the human body and mind.

Second, fair and accurate terminology. This is a subject which has been bedeviled by confusing speech and Orwellian speech. And our first goal was to clarify the terminology that confounds this discussion, beginning with the idea of human cloning itself.

Whatever the purpose for which human cloning is undertaken, the act that produces the genetic replica is the very first step; the creation of an embryonic clone. Accordingly, the Council has insisted that what we mean by human cloning is the production of cloned human embryos, the earliest stage of developing human life with the intention, then, of either transferring these embryos to a uterus in order to initiate a pregnancy or taking them apart in order to obtain their stem cells for research.

The first use in the popular discussion has been called reproductive cloning or cloning; the second has come to be called therapeutic cloning, research cloning, or nuclear transfer for stem cell research. The Council, instead, chose to call them cloning to produce children or cloning for biomedical research. These terms are accurate, they allow us to debate the moral questions without euphemistic distortion or Orwellian speech.

Whether one favors or opposes cloning to produce children; whether one favors or opposes cloning for biomedical research, the Council insists that we must acknowledge that both uses of cloning begin with the same act, the production of cloned human embryos.

Third point, the ethics of cloning to produce children. Regarding cloning to produce children, the Council is in agreement with the bulk of the nation and the Congress. The Council was unanimous, in fact, that cloning to produce children should be opposed both morally and legally. Not only is the technique demonstrably unsafe, it could never be safely attempted.

And the Council opposes this practice not only because it's unsafe, but because it would imperil the freedom and dignity of the cloned child, the cloning parents, and the entire society. And we make arguments to the effect that, by enabling parents for the first time to predetermine in advance the entire genetic makeup of their children, it would be a major step toward turning procreation into manufacture; it would also confound family relations and personal identity; would create new stresses between parents and offspring; and might open the door to a new eugenics where parents or society could replicate the genomes of individuals, not excluding themselves, who they deem to be superior.

Fourth area is the ethics of cloning for biomedical research. And here the Council, like the nation, was divided. On the one hand, we acknowledged that the research offers the prospect--though speculative at the moment--of gaining valuable knowledge and treatments for many diseases. On the other hand, this practice would require the exploitation and destruction of nascent human life, created solely for the purpose of research and it risks coarsening our moral sensibility.

Individual Council members weighed these moral concerns differently. Yet, all members of the Council--and I'm delighted about this--all members of the Council agreed that each side in this debate had something vital to defend, not only for itself, but for all of us.

Every side understood that we cannot afford to be casual about human suffering; we cannot afford to be cavalier with how we treat nascent human life; and we can't afford to be indifferent about how we decide amongst the alternative.

Each side, we've also agreed, must face up to the moral burden of either approving or disapproving this research; namely, on the one hand that some who might be healed more rapidly, might not be; on the other hand, that we will become a society that creates and uses some lives in the service of others.

Finally, on the recommendations of public policy, we offered two policy recommendations; both of them distinct from the most prominent legislative proposals in counsel. Both recommendations called for a permanent ban on cloning to produce children; thus giving public force to the nation's strong ethical verdict against this practice.

Where the Council differed was in how to approach cloning for biomedical research. A minority of the Council recommended that we proceed now with such potentially crucial research but only with significant regulations in place, including federal licensing, oversight, and strict limits on how long cloned embryos may be allowed to develop.

A majority of the Council, myself included, recommended that no human cloning of any kind be permitted at this time. We proposed that Congress enact a four-year federal moratorium on all human cloning, including cloning for biomedical research, beginning with the act of the production of cloned human embryos.

And we argued for this moratorium on a number of grounds: That it would provide the time for the debate to continue whether we should cross this crucial moral boundary creating human life solely as a resource for research. The policy of a moratorium would allow time for other areas of stem cell research, both adult and embryonic, to proceed. It would allow time for those who believe cloning for biomedical research can never be ethically pursued to make their case; and those who believe that it can to convince the nation that this is true by designing a responsible system of regulation and public oversight before we go forward.

A national moratorium would also allow the debate on the question of research on cloned embryos to be taken up in the larger context where it belongs--the context on embryo research all together, as well as questions regarding future possibilities of genetic engineering of human life.

Pending such debate, the majority of the Council held that no law should now be enacted that approves or authorizes any human cloning.

We find ourselves, now, with the Senate having gone home and failing to act on the cloning legislation, in the circumstance where the question is still before us and will come back up for consideration and, even as we speak, there are reports that Dr. Antinori has claimed that a clonal pregnancy is in the works an the first cloned child might be born soon. I think it behooves us, as human beings and citizens to continue to think about these things and to urge our representatives to step forward and act when next time they convene.

MR. SNOW: Diana Schaub will have the first comment.

MS. SCHAUB: On the over of the report of the President's Council on Bioethics is the image of a fingerprint. It's an inspired choice, for the fingerprint, as Leon Kass's foreword says, has rich biological and moral significance.

The fingerprint is at once emblematic of our common humanity and our individual uniqueness; no two alike; even identical twins have distinct fingerprints. Presumably, a cloned human being also, as a sort of delayed-entry twin, would not be a perfect repeat, at least not all the way down to the tips of her fingers.

DNA is not the whole of our nature. It is, however, a good deal of it and the question raised by recent scientific development is whether and how much we ought to stick our fingers in it. Ought we to put our own impress upon the means by which human beings come to be?

As Mr. Kass points out, fingerprints are the marks left by our grasp on things. A grasp that is sometimes illicit. This is why the police know as much about fingerprints as scientists do. And it is why the decisions to be made about cloning are properly political decisions. It belongs to citizens and legislators to police the bounds of the human grasp; to determine what may be manipulated, manhandled and doctored and in what ways. While the liberty of the mind is by right absolute, actions may, with justification, be restricted or forbidden.

Let me suggest another metaphoric image that came to mind while reading this report. Not the fingerprint, but the navel. And especially the exercise referred to as contemplating your navel. Now, before anyone mistakes this for a criticism, uncivilly expressed, let me hasten to say that I'm using the expression rather unidiomatically. Contemplating your navel usually means to relax and withdraw from the world, to zone out, waste time, and daydream. I don't mean that.

I mean that the Council has meditated on the human core and that it has deepened our self-understanding by reflecting on matters often overlooked. In "Brave New World," the inhabitants of the world state are hatched and decanted, rather than born. I surmise that Huxley's betas, deltas, and epsilons manufactured in uniform batches by Bokanovsky's process, are entirely without belly buttons. So, while we still have them, we might do well to contemplate them.

In effect, that is what this report does. It explores the meaning of procreation and the human significance of sexual reproduction. It articulates the links between sexual reproduction and the ground and purpose of the human family; the continuity of the generations, the formation of individual identities, and the bearing of our freedom and our mortality.

The report enables us to understand all that is at stake in the advent of asexual reproduction. Cloning is a form of generation that would confound the generation. A woman who had herself cloned would be both mother and identical twin sister to her clone. She would, in effect, have become the mother of herself. To aim to be the mother of oneself is the height of hubris and despotism; it is the crime of incest, the begetting of one's own upon one's own, scientifically perfected.

The cloning of human beings would be the triumph of the Machiavellian project to conquer fortune and bring everything within the power of human choice and calculation. By raising serious doubts about that modern project, the report offers a vindication of the element of chance in human life. It shows how human dignity is bound up with the lottery of nature and how the ground of human dignity could be imperiled by an attempt to extend human controls over the human essence.

The counsel of wisdom and prudence of both theoretical and practical intelligence is to stick with our old-fashioned, erratic, and happy-go-lucky mode of generation rather than embracing the new science of solitary self genesis.

We should remain true to the belly button. The belly button which reminds us of our indebtedness of our origin, but which also bespeaks our directedness toward a self-standing existence.

In its combination of profound reflection on human nature, it's immediate policy concerns and decisions, the Report of the President's Council on Bioethics is reminiscent of the "Federalist Papers." A work which Jefferson, himself, no Federalist judged to be the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written. I predict a similar authoritative status for this report, in the sphere of bioethics.

In a sense, the report is even more remarkable than the "Federalist Papers," inasmuch as the "Federalist Papers" had a partisan and, even, propagandistic purpose. Imagine if we, instead, had a document called the "Constitution Papers," a joint product of Federalists and anti-Federalists, laying out for the citizenry the full panoply of arguments and counterarguments. That is what the report is like. Even when it gives expression to the Council's unanimous opposition to cloning to produce children, the report details the arguments that might be mustered in support of such cloning.

More especially, when the topic is cloning for biomedical research, where the Council was, itself, split, the report, with a united voice, carefully delineates both the majority and minority views and seeks to bring them into conversation with one another. This dialectical approach is so rare one hardly knows how to respond to it.

Certainly, one comes away with new respect for the potential of reasoned discourse within a democracy. Moreover, I at least came away with the conviction that if one were, with an open mind, to read the whole of the report, including the appendix of personal statements, one would be persuaded with the rightness of banning all human cloning, whether for the purpose of children or research.

In the pageant of argument, some of them looked distinctly thin and weak. And, yet, dampening one's hopes that truth will emerge the winner from the staging of such a pageant, is the fact that the participants, themselves, despite their respectful listening to one another, did not achieve agreement.

Well, they did and they didn't. On the question of cloning to produce children there was a welcome unanimity. However, on the question of cloning for biomedical research, there was a deadlock, with seven members for permitting it, seven for banning it and three in the middle in favor of a moratorium. And for the rest of my time, I would like to talk about the meaning of that deadlock and what it portends for the future.

In the end, the seven in favor of a permanent ban were willing to join with the three in favor of a temporary ban, in order to produce a majority, recommending a moratorium. From what we've seen so far in Congress, the deadlock is being repeated there, though with less prospects of a policy compromise emerging. Indeed, the deadlock over cloning for biomedical research may make any sort of legislative action unlikely; even a ban on cloning to produce children and this, despite, the near universal opposition to such cloning. The division over cloning for biomedical research is a division not so much over cloning, as over the status of the human embryo, cloned or not. Until that larger issue--with its implications for embryo research in general, as well as for the current practice of in vitro fertilization, and, of course, abortion--until that is resolved, we risk ending up with a laissez-faire policy on cloning that very few Americans want.

I did find it tremendously heartening that the split within the Council was not between scientists and humanists. For instance, four of the six M.D.s voted for the moratorium on research cloning. And, in some cases, clearly favored strengthening that to a ban. It seemed, indeed, that those who knew most about embryology, spoke most persuasively about the unsustain-ability of the claim that 14-day-old and younger embryos might be treated with less than full human respect because less than fully human.

Dr. Hurlbut, for instance, both in his detailed responses on the subject of gastrulation and twinning and in his general explanation of potentiality and organismal unity, showed how the evidence of science supports the claims that the early embryo has an inviolable moral status.

Chairman Kass reminds us, in the foreword, that reasonable and morally serious people can differ about fundamental issues. But I take it that this unique experiment in clarifying the differences is undertaken in the hope that such clarification will lead to the concord of truth. In other words, this is not a matter about which we can just agree to disagree. There is an imperative to continue reasoning with one another, which implies, I think, that there is reason with a capital "R" out there somewhere and that reasonable people--were they perfectly reasonable or even just sufficiently reasonable to the occasion would arrive at it.

As Lincoln said of the slavery controversy, "whenever the issue can be distinctly made and all the extraneous matter thrown out so that men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled and it will be done peaceably, too."

Now, maybe the cloning controversy is not like the slavery controversy. Certainly, we hope that there is no looming prospect of civil war should the division of opinion continue.

Leon Kass suggests there is another difference, as well. In the foreword, he says that, with slavery or despotism, it is easy to identify evil as evil and the challenge is, rather, to figure out how best to combat it. But in the realm of bioethics we face if, indeed, they are evil, are intertwined with the good we so keenly seek; cures for disease; relief of suffering and preservation of life. When good and bad are so intermixed, distinguishing between them is often extremely difficult.

In talking of the complexity and difficulty of the bioethical enterprise, chairman Kass was, perhaps, being diplomatic. This remark would be in the same vein as the reasonable people can differ statement, inasmuch as it gives further reason for why they might differ. Nonetheless, and with considerable trepidation, I feel I must take issue with the statement.

The trepidation arises because Mr. Kass was my teacher at Chicago and because I believe the nation-at-large is now blessed in having them as their teacher--at the risk, both of seeming ungrateful and of being wrong, I would only point out that it was not at all easy to bring men to see slavery as evil; particularly, not once the practice of slavery was well established in the life of the nation.

Moreover, in the controversy over slavery, as Lincoln, himself, admitted, there was legitimate goods at stake for the slave-holding South; among them, security, self-preservation and the preservation of their way of life--the states' lives; specific constitutional guarantees, and, I suppose, a certain kind of honor. Lincoln's acknowledgement, however, of the weightiness of espoused legitimate concerns didn't stop Lincoln from a moment from declaring slavery an evil and insisting that one cannot attain those real human goods by the route of perpetuating slavery.

There is a difference between granting credence to the good sought by one's opponent and granting credence to their arguments or plan.

We are armed now, with this invaluable report. And so it seems to me the time has come to frame the issue more sharply. Cloning is an evil and cloning for the purpose of research rather than children adds to the evil of cloning; the evil of the willful destruction of innocent human life, and a proposal countenancing this on a mass scale as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion.

Of my teacher, I would like to ask, is it either incorrect or misleading or unhealthful to see the dispute over cloning as of a peace with the slavery crisis and the abortion debate? And, further, if the example of Lincoln is pertinent, then does talk of moral complexity and the intertwinededness of good and evil and the intractability of the issues make it harder to identify evil as evil and more likely that we will end up in "Brave New World?" where despotism masquerades as a conception of the good?

The model of the world state, with which Huxley's novel opens is community, identity, stability. I suspect our own path to biomedical despotism will be guided by the words progress, compassion, and choice.

MR. SNOW: I believe that will generate some conversation. Next up is Charles Murray.

MR. MURRAY: It is customary when one is to make critical remarks to start out by saying, bright and nice things about the person one is criticizing and I want to do that now, but nor pro forma.

I think this document, "Human Cloning and Human Dignity," is superb. It's a kind of--it's the kind of reasoned discourse that you would like to think is used for all public issues and almost never is. And furthermore, Leon Kass is the best possible person to head up this effort. I have known Leon for many years. I have no other person I can think of who brings to this kind of discourse both the moral seriousness and the power of intellect and the generosity of spirit with those with whom he disagrees. It was a wonderful job, Leon. And, if, after all of that, you aren't nervous what I'm about to say now, then you haven't been listening carefully.

Here's how I wished the report had begun: Leon would phrase it much more eloquently than I'm about to, but there's a sense of what I wish had been said goes like this: As students of the history of science, we understand that it is not within our power, nor within the power of the United States to have one iota of effect on what's going to happen with human cloning. This technology will develop at its own pace and, to an extent, that will be dictated by what can be done not by what we wish would be done. We understand the folly of trying to imitate King Knute.

However, we are also students of the problems of being human and the problems of human institutions. And we see in this arising technology ways in which these institutions are placed at risk--especially that core institution of the family--and we see ways in which our understanding of what it means to be human could easily be compromised in ways which would leave us spiritually poor and bereft of many of the sources of human fulfillment that we now enjoy. Therefore, our task is not to propose regulation, nor laws, for we understand their futility. But it is to engage in a dialogue with those who are doing this research so that we may manage it as best we can with as little harm and as much good as possible.

That's what I wish had been in there. And the reason is that I think--and I do not say this gladly--I think it is not serious to think that the United States can pronounce on what's going to happen with this technology. We can't. Nothing in any of the past examples when we have had scientific possibility has anybody been able to put a lid on any kind of scientific inquiry and this one is different in time in terms of its attractiveness.

If, in 1939, when we had the physics for the atom bomb already in had, but if we didn't have a Hitler at that point, I think it is quite possible that large numbers of physicists would have said take this cup from our lips, we don't want to spend the next five years building an atom bomb.

This is different. You have scientists working on this problem who do not see themselves as engaged in the work of the devil. They see themselves as doing things which will bring incalculable benefit to mankind. They do not see Leon Kass and the Council and its majority recommendations as people who are trying to hold back and ponder at more length an extremely difficult moral question. I fear that they see them as troglodytes.

Furthermore, there is, in the work of these five geneticists hundreds of billions of dollars to be made. If you take a combination of people who think they are doing the Lord's work--even if most of it are doing it probably aren't religious--but if you have people who think they are about to do good and if you have hundreds of billions of dollars to be made, I promise you, it will happen. It won't happen in the United States, maybe, if we pass certain laws, but it will happen.

And in this, I think there are a variety of ways in which the Council's report, much as I admire it in its tone and its spirit, I think, represents a missed opportunity. Because if you say that the end state is that this technology will be developed, then you say to yourself, well, what's the best possible of those alternative scenarios we have.

I'll tell you the best one as far as I'm concerned: That the United States remain the center of this research; that the top scientists of the world are socialized here; that the best graduate students come over here and spend several years learning how to do this stuff that they also learn it in an atmosphere which is, in a sense, not a vocation, not only a science, but of the ethics involved.

That's not going to happen in China. That's not going to happen in Barbados, if that's where they build the laboratories. That's not going to happen at any of the places in the world where this work is done.

A couple of things I'm afraid are exacerbated by the report. One is it's going to be very hard to get a dialogue going. I--I think, my impression anyway, from scientists to whom I have listened talk about this is that you've got the Jesse Helms syndrome, now having said it, whereby if a position is one that Jesse Helms supports, you can be sure nobody in academia is going to say they're for it, even if they are just because of the association.

Well, we now have a situation, I'm afraid, in which the very difficult moral issues posed by cloning now have, as those who are worried about them, conservative Republicans, that's bad. That makes it that much harder to carry on a dialogue.

I am also worried about supportability of this science. I said a few minutes ago that China's laboratories and Barbados and wherever else are not going to be as worried about this, well that's where they're going to go. I must say that the only place in the report that referred to this was one paragraph, which said, well, if we have strict laws against certain kinds of work in Michigan and in Germany and thereby the genetic industry still seems to be doing just fine. I'm sorry, that's not good enough.

We are at very early days here of a very big business, portability of science has increased enormously, portability in a variety of ways. Portability of collegeship [ph], you don't have to be on a Cal Tech campus to have collegeships with people at Cal Tech. You don't have to be within the continental limits of the United States to have collegeships all over this country, the Internet takes care of that. You don't need to have a university setting in order to have state-of-the-art laboratories in this kind of work. All you need is money, and there is going to be lots of money from this kind of work.

You add into that the motivations of the people who are doing the work, who believe deeply in what they are doing and believe they are doing good--I'm not sure how many people we're going to see moving out of the United States--that's not really the future I'm looking at. I'm looking at a future in which the United States is no longer the center of this--a future in which the United States is no longer doing the socialization of scientists who work in that these areas. A United States that is at the periphery.

And if I'm to carry on this gloomy forecast, I will add in a few topics that people just don't want to think about. I mentioned science. There are all sorts of things that are going to be possible in terms of this technology within a fairly short period of time. Some of them are really awful. I don't think China is going to blink at any of those. And, whereas the use of this as a kind of weapon is not something that I think is nearly as the use of the atom bomb as a kind of weapon, you cannot overlook the ways in which that will happen, too.

Now, as I hear myself say these things, I imagine that there are a variety of questions that people could reasonably ask, you know, like, is this man completely indifferent to the question of simply doing the right thing? No, I'm not. I think probably I am troubled by the downside, the dark side of this technology as Leon is. I probably see more promise in the upside, but I'm certainly troubled by the dark side.

But when you are making moral decisions not just for yourself, it's fine to take on the consequences of those, but when you're making them for large groups of people, a utilitarian, calculus must enter in. And if that sounds cold-blooded, it's no more cold-blooded than saying, if you are doing something that's morally the right thing to do but it's also going to bring great pain on your spouse and children, you have a different thing you have to bring into the mix in deciding what you want to do.

Well, in this kind of case, when you are making decisions for a nation on something which I am asserting will have no practical effect, you are making an empty moral gesture, in my view, in the face of all sorts of bad things that are going to happen because of it.

Now, I want to back off that statement, because in the course of talking about these things, I tend, at least, in this presentation to sound more apocalyptic than I feel about the nature of the conclusion. A four-year moratorium is a very modest kind of recommendation. You are not going to see huge damage done to the position of the United States in the next five years because the Council did this. I am, rather, referring to the increased probability, the wide variety of things going wrong.

I think we're in the position, essentially, that I mentioned about 1939. The science is in place. A moral person can say human beings should not have this technology within their power. I am wiling to grant that, if it were within the power of political decisions to say human beings shall be prevented from having this, there would be a good moral case for taking that government action.

If that cannot be done, one is then faced with saying human beings will have this capacity, what can we do to minimize the damage and to enhance the benefits?

And, Leon, in closing, let me simply say that there is one nice thing, as I consider these remarks, that gives me comfort and that is, on your panel, were included a number of people, you among them, whose intellect and whose judgment I respect enormously. And you guys all disagree with me and this gives me some hope that I'm wrong.

MR. SNOW: William Galston, next.

MR. GALSTON: Well, if I'm known to you at all, it's probably as a political hack or a policy wonk or a not notably successful White House Aid. But every once in a while, I venture into the telephone booth and come out garbed in my real suit, which is as a moral and political philosopher. And it's in that guise that I offer these somewhat fragmentary comments.

Let me begin with the headline--I've been in Washington for 20 years, so I now know that's what I'm supposed to do. Despite my disagreement with some specific conclusions and recommendations, I have come to praise this report and not to bury it. And let me begin by saying why under a variety of heads.

First of all, is its civility of calm, by which, I mean, not just mutually respectful language among the Council members, but something more. A model of how scholarly expertise can contribute to democratic deliberation and debate. The report offers, so far as the son of a biologist who is not himself a biologist can judge--sound science, excessively and impartially presented in the service of moral and policy reflection. The sort of reflection in which nonexperts--citizens and their representatives--you and I must engage.

The contrast between this report and the prevailing tone of our public discord is painful. Beyond the civility of tone is something that I will call civility of substance. And in this respect, I applaud as true what Diana Schaub condemned as evasive. In this report, the proponents of the different positions do not argue that all the relevant reasons, principles, and human good are on their side, whatever it may be. To say, as they do, that the balance or preponderance of good and reason point in one direction rather than another is to give substance--moral substance to the view that others of intellect and good will can legitimately arrive at different conclusions. Indeed, and I think this is a very, very important insight, the overall thrust of this report is that vitally important goods and principles are not only at stake in the cloning debate, but are also at odds with one another.

The choice is not so much between good and evil and between good and good. As the report insists, quote, "each side in the debate has something vital to defend not only for itself but for everyone" close quote.

The third reason that I admire this report is the breadth of the moral reflection in which it engages. The moral inquiry into which it enters is not just conducted in the spirit of cost-benefit utilitarianism or fashionable rights talk. It emphasizes broad and deep reflection on what is good for human beings. And not only as individuals, but as social beings embedded, as we know we are, in a network of familial, social, and political relations.

To which I would add, that this report offers not just the well-worn, though important and relevant, indeed, unavoidable debate about the status of the human embryo but, also, productive, innovative lines of inquiry into the nature of good lives and of good societies.

Fourth, this report is quietly but boldly countercultural. Now what do I mean by that? Well, the report dares to suggest that our characteristic American principled predilections and strengths--our orientation toward things such as life and freedom and innovation and compassion and faith in progress that bring us such blessings can also be the source of moral blindness and, even, hubris. The report dares to suggest that, on occasion, there are things more important than mere life. Let me use the old Aristotelian term for these things: the good life. And that in case of a clash between lives and good lives, it's not always clear which way to go. And even more boldly and counterculturally, the report dares to suggest--and I think we ought to talk about this--that there are things even more important than the relief of suffering. This is an amazingly bold proposition. And to give you some idea of the boldness, let me read you language from three widely separated portions of this report--the beginning, the middle, and close to the end.

From the beginning, quote, "easing suffering is not our only small obligation;" from the middle, "suffering should not be opposed by any means possible;." and towards the end, if a moratorium on cloning for biomedical research is enacted, quote, "it is possible that some might suffer in the future because research proceeded more slowly. We cannot suppose that the moral life comes without cost" close quote. Very challenging proposition.

Another thing I admire about this report is this scrambling of conventional ideological categories. Congratulations. For example, I note with great interest, that two of the best known conservatives on the Council, Charles Krauthammer and James Q. Wilson disagree with many other conservatives, while agreeing with one another in denying the human embryos the status of full personhood. They nonetheless manage to disagree with one another concerning the single-most contested policy issue before the Council; namely, cloning for biomedical research. I cannot imagine a more instructive lesson in what I will call, approvingly, antidogmatism.

I note at the conclusion of the first part of my remarks some--a very important feature of the language in which this report is framed. And, for short, let me call it moral but not theological. Now, why do I say this, well for the following reason: While various members of the Council are well known for their religious views and the authors of its report collectively insist that religion has a valid and important role to play in the public square, this report is remarkable for what I take it--the chairman can disabuse me of this, take it to be its deliberate effort to find a public language accessible to individuals of differing faiths and of no faith at all.

There is no reference in this report to a specific doctrinal or theological position and, as far as I can tell, there may be a solitary exception to this, no mention even of God, which is probably a good thing. For example, traditional Catholicism and orthodox Judaism, though united on many social issues, differ profoundly over the status of the young human embryo and their public representatives have advocated opposing policy positions on important questions.

Now, having praised the report in at least due measure, I turn now to the second part of my remarks, which consist of four mild criticisms and a concluding partisan jab, just to enliven the proceedings.

Mild criticism number one, in the moral, not theological language of this report. I find not one, but two key and discernibly different moral traditions represented. One can be traced back to Aristotle, I believe. It's the picture of the moral universe in which there is a multiplicity of human and social good and in which there is--

[Technical interruption.]

MR. GALSTON: --balancing deliberation to establish what's most important and needful with regard to a particular issue in a particular situation.

The second of these issues can be traced back to Kant. And here, the focus is on human dignity and respect. It yields moral principles that are true or held to be true categorically without exception. Frequently these principles consist in absolute prohibitions on certain kinds of conduct whatever the consequences of adhering to the prohibition may be. I think it was this Kantian dimension of the report to which Charles Murray was reacting in implicitly in the invoking Max Weber's ethics of responsibilities over against the ethic of intention.

Now, if I'm right in discerning these two moral strands in the language of the report, this discernment leads to an obvious question; namely, are these two traditions fully compatible? Do they read to the same kind of moral analysis or to the same conclusion? And what happens when they don't?

Now just to bring this high falutin philosophical analysis down to earth, let me offer an intriguing example. In a remarkable passage of the report, the Council, which unanimously opposed what is commonly known as reproductive cloning, states, and I quote, "we are willing to grant that there may be exceptional cases in which cloning to produce children is morally defensible." close quote.

The Council then goes on to say that, quote, "such cases do not justify the harmful experiments and social problems that might be entailed by engaging in human cloning, hard cases make bad law." close quote.

Now, let me just state the obvious. It's easy to defend a legislative ban on cloning of whatever kind on the basis of an absolute moral prohibition underlying it. It becomes harder to defend an absolute legislative ban when the underlying morality, though inclining strongly in one direction, is less than absolute. At one point, the report asks, is discovering new cures for the sick, quote, "a moral imperative that should trump all other goods and values?" that's a good question. Along with the authors of this report, I believe that the answer is clearly no.

But I must, then, go on to ask, is there any moral imperative that should trump all other goods and values in all circumstances? My answer to that wider question is, also, no. I wonder whether the Council's majority would agree with me in my answer to this wider question? And this is not just a theoretical issue in moral philosophy, it has consequences for our understanding of law and jurisprudence, among other things.

While I'm on the subject of the relationship between law and morality, I must note one point on which I flatly disagree with the entire Council. The report asserts at one point that if society accepts, that is, fails to prohibit a practice, then society may be said not only to endorse but to engage in that practice. I think that that is just plain wrong. In a liberal democratic polity with a limited government, marked by multiple sources of legitimate authority, public law will, of necessity, permit many individual, associational, and religious practices which it cannot be said to endorse, let alone to participate in. To think otherwise is to implicitly to affirm a conception of public authority as all responsible and all powerful.

I cannot imagine that the Council--good liberal citizens speaking to other good citizens of a liberal democracy, really means to say that.

Now, let me make a few other comments as I went my way towards my conclusion. This is my second criticism or third, actually. With regard to children, the report offers a very interesting distinction. It distinguishes between two understandings of children: understanding one, children as gifts and blessings that we learn to accept as gratefully as we can; understanding two, children as products of our wills that we try to shape in accordance with our desires. And the report unequivocally endorses the first understanding rather than the second. I don't think it's so simple.

I don't think we are morally obliged to prescind from, let us say, prenatal genetic (inaudible) to remedy remediable defects in fetuses. And medical science is giving us the opportunity to do this. We do not have to learn to accept those defects as gratefully as we can if we have learned to do something about them that is morally permissible, as I believe that we do. And, furthermore, to, you know, to move away from these depths, I would say that so much of parenting is a matter of striking a difficult balance between shaping on the one hand and accepting on the other. It's not one or the other, it's both. And I think the report, in the understandable desire to criticize American activist hubris, leans too far in the direction of a kind of principal passivity that contradicts the Council's quest for moral balance.

Final criticism before the partisan jab--some reflections on the role of moral sentiments. Taking their bearings from James Q. Wilson, the Council members who favor regulated cloning for the purpose of biomedical research argue that our moral sentiments point toward a distinction between young embryos on the one hand and infants on the other. A distinction expressed, for example, in different levels, kinds, and durations of mourning in the case of the catastrophe overcoming one or the other. And Professor Wilson asks rhetorically--and I quote, "Do we assign the same moral blame to harvesting organs from a new born infant and from a seven-day-old blastocyst?" As a matter of the majority's moral sentiments, and by that I mean a majority of the American people, clearly, not of the Council, the answer to that question is no. The question then becomes, what is the force--the moral force of our instinctive or some would put it, natural responses to morally latent phenomena?

The Council's majority argues that we are obligated to shape or in this case reshape our emotional responses, our sentimental responses, in light of our moral obligations as revealed by reason and maybe that's true. But this raises the further question of the role that moral sentiments ought to play in defining the content of our rational obligations. And this is a question on which the chairman of the Council, who has written a famous article, entitled, and I quote, "The Wisdom of Repugnance" is especially well qualified to shed some additional light.

Finally, the Council's majority declares, quote, "How we respond to the weakest among us, to those who are nowhere near the zenith of human flourishing, says much about our willingness to envision the boundaries of humanity, expansively and inclusively. It challenges the depth of our commitment to equality." Hubert Humphrey couldn't have put it better. This proposition which the Council puts forward as a truth not confined to the question of cloning leads in the direction of a robust social policy oriented toward the most vulnerable in our society.

The alternative, I fear, resembles Barney Frank's famous definition of a social conservative, as someone who believes that life begins at conception and ends at birth. Thank you very, much.

MR. SNOW: Joseph Bottum.

MR. BOTTUM: It's going to be hard to sound more apocalyptic than Charles Murray and Diana Schaub, but I'll try. There are three directions which we might take this discussion about the report from the President's Council on Bioethics.

We might talk, first, about the issue of cloning itself. Then, again, we might turn to the deliberations of the Council as presented in the book and talk about the divisions and insights among the Council's members. Finally, we might take this discussion to be about politics, which is to say the impact and the importance in the real world of the policy recommendations made by the report. About all three of these, I have enormous amounts to say, more than could ever be fit into the time we have, but here are a first few thoughts.

Professor Galston spoke of the report's civility and praised it enormously. But I wonder if that civility is entirely to be applauded. The report, for instance, does not sufficiently express the horror and the repugnance that the shear idea of cloning arouses in me. Perhaps an analogy for that feeling will help. I once tried to write a poem about an attractive young woman I had seen walking down the street. I suppose she was not beautiful, per se, but I had reached the age at which youth itself begins to seem beautiful.

Those of you here who are still young may not understand what I am talking about, but for those of us growing old there is a lure in youthfulness, the tautness of it, the glow. And there is also a crime to act upon that lure, to seek one's own youth restored by leaching on the youthfulness of others. This is the mockable widower seeing a young bride in Moliere's comedies. It is the sexual sickness expressed in Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby" when the aging Arthur Gride drools over the young Madelaine, after using her father's debts to force her into his power.

But it is also something more: It is, in fact, the fantasy of age that would sacrifice the young to buy its way back from the aches and diseases that age is prone to. There is, for instance, the old witch who wants to fatten up Hansel and Gretel before she bakes them in her over. And then there is Elizabeth Bathory, the sixteenth-century countess and, perhaps the most famous figure to come out of Transylvania since Vlad the Impaler. her seventeenth-century trial records estimate that she slaughtered 600 young virgins in a decade in order to bathe in their youth-restoring blood.

Let me bring the analogy home. [Laughter.] The proponents of much of the biotech revolution, the supporters and enablers of the "brave new world" of eugenics biotechnology are forced into the uncomfortable position of insisting that Countess Bathory was absolutely right, at least about her goals--she merely chose the wrong means.

I mean that no quite in the provocative sense in which I phrased it. She was obviously wrong about the effect of virgins' blood on the skin and she lacked the help of Advanced Cell Technologies Laboratories up in Massachusetts. But she also chose the wrong means because she used living, conscious human beings and insists the proponents of cloning for biomedical research, the objects upon which modern laboratories work are not human beings, but cells--biological accidents, bits of human beings which, because of ancient prejudices must be spoken of in referential ways, but which need not be treated any differently than a fingernail clipping or in that great euphemism of the abortions the product of conception.

But I want to think about this in terms of human motivation. Indeed, when the President's Council distinguishes cloning for biomedical research to cloning to produce children, it invites us to notice that the primary distinction between them is, in fact, a matter of human motivation; namely, the purpose for which the biotechnologist created the clone.

What Diana ascribed to--Diana Schaub--ascribed to Machieavelli, I'd like to blame on Francis Bacon. Much has been made by Francis Buckiyama [ph] and others about the effect of recent eugenics to complete the Baconian Project: the great vision of Francis Bacon that science will finally ameliorate the human condition so that we will all be happy and diseaseless and neigh on immortal.

I think it is right to notice this fulfillment of the promise that Bacon made centuries ago. But there is something else to notice, as well; namely, that Bacon required for his dream that we dismiss all notion of purpose and goal for the objects of science. Indeed, Bacon's "New Organon" is filled with the text upon the Aristotelian idea of final causation, a natural purpose or aim for things. But, of course, goals don't actually go away just for our wishing that they do so.

In the space opened up by the dismissal of final cause from science, there entered the malleability of things to the human will: we give them their purpose, we give them their final cause. The human act is conceived to be the only thing in the universe that has motive, purpose, goal or aim and those motives will eventually eat up the reality of everything else. In fact, they have already eaten up the reality.

There are very serious political problems with the report of the Report President's Council on Bioethics. And I hope we get to them in our discussions today.

But think about this: The Council was unanimous in wanting to prohibit forever cloning to produce children and could, only by the barest majority, reach the compromise of a temporary moratorium on cloning for biomedical research. This seems to me exactly backwards.

However much cloning to produce children proceeds along defective means, it still aims at the natural cause of procreation. It wants to make babies. Cloning for biomedical research, on the other hand, has abandoned the goal. Embryos, fetuses, blastocysts, activated eggs, products of SCNT--whatever euphemism is floating around this week--cloning for biomedical research takes those things and makes them plastic play thing for the human will. And the human will, more over, in a line of motivation that is, on its face, suspect; if we remember Moliere and Dickens and the old, old stories. We have become the people that once upon a time our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against.

Now, Francis Bacon, is not the only thing to exist in modernity. If you haven't guessed, I hold a somewhat more jaundiced view of scientists than Professor Murray does. From Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," the literary imagination has not pictured the prospect of manufactured human beings with much joy. From Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" to H.G. Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau" the literary imagination has not been much taken with scientists who manipulate the deep things of life just because they can.

The truth is, after reading these authors, reading the report from the President's Council on Bioethics, as well, I worry about people who reach into the stuff of life and twist it to their will. I worry about people who act simply because they can. If they lived in crumbling castles, their hair standing up on end, and their voices howling in maniacal laughter, we'd know that they were made scientists. But they wear nice white lab coats and their chief executive brings his pleasant face on television to assure us that they are really acting for the best of medical motives and, besides, there is a great deal of money to be made in biotech and pharmaceutical stocks.

Sometimes the disingenuous, you know, is unbearable. Evading the regulations in France, the French company Clonaid, recently opened a laboratory in the Ivory Coast and its spokeswoman announced that they had done so in response for the great demand for cloning in Subsaharin Africa. [Laughter.] Yes, my wife suggested, those poor Africans desperate for food, drinking water, and cloning.

But Clonaid's move to Africa seems to me the final proof necessary of the dangerousness of unlimited human will. The people who say that this--as some of the reports do at the end--some of the comments at the end of the report--the people who say that we can regulate this along the way, it seems to me, are simply ignorant of human will.

If you were to put up a lever with a sign that said don't touch or the world will be destroyed. The paint wouldn't even be dry before someone's last words were, I just wanted to see what would happen. [Laughter.]

We need to thank Dr. Kass and all the members of the panel for the seriousness they brought to these deliberations. But I also think we have to worry about the effect this report is going to have in legitimating the civility that is its finest feature.

MR. SNOW: Dr. Kass, up to you.

DR. KASS: I'm practically speechless. [Laughter.] And because there are cameras running, one can't afford to be speechless, but the first--the first thing to say is that if there are vacancies on the Council, I would like to invite all four of these people to join us. These were remarkable--really remarkable comments. And I mean that quite apart from, in fact, despite the flattering remarks for the report and the Council and the chair. I mean these were deeply searching, very thoughtful, very well considered comments and I regard it as just an enormous gift to our enterprise to have elicited these remarks from the floor. You really just a splendid, splendid presentation all four.

And I'm not going to be able to do justice to the assignment. I'm slow. And if I have time to digest the various comments in detail, I will do better and I will try, actually, if there are written comments, to respond to you personally.

But it seems to me one way to join comments made by Diana Schaub, Charles Murray, and Bill Galston is to raise the question--and Bill raised it very nicely when he asked whether we are dealing in the moral realm of prudence in the absence of some kind of inflexible "thou shalt not" or whether we are dealing in a moral universe here where there are certain sorts of things that are really, in a way, abominations, like, slavery in which to do--to sit and say, on the one hand, on the other is, in fact as Joedy Bottum would suggest, by civility lend countenance and cover to genuine evil.

And I guess I have to say that it's not just that--the ambiguity on this question in the report is not solely due to the chair's uncertainty on this question. But it's, I think, a genuine perplexity. Is this really like slavery? The people who have argued the abortion question, have argued against it--have tried with, I think, some eloquence to suggest that this isn't exactly an analogous situation. The difference being that the youngest amongst us don't look enough like us and have no lawyers and cannot speak for themselves in the way in which living, breathing human beings will eventually find partisans to point out these evil. That's one genuine question.

On the other hand, if we really are in the situation where we're dealing with competing goods, as Bill Galston suggests, then it's a question of calculation of--presumably in the name of not just safety and efficacy, but larger things. And it is the realm of prudence. And I go back and forth on this, I genuinely do. It does seem to me that much of the moral live has to be lived, somehow, with a combination of these principles. There are boundary conditions of "thou shalt nots," which, in fact, set the limits to what human powers can accomplish and only thanks to the fact that there are certain kinds of firm and nonnegotiable limits do you have a safe moral realm in which prudence can govern without everything being up for grabs.

And I'm inclined to say that I think that the creation of nascent live for the sole purpose of exploitation and research involving its necessary destruction is a moral boundary of that sort. Despite the fact that--speaking now, absolutely for myself and not for the Council--I'm easily sympathetic to the various arguments here. That despite the fact that I regard the embryo as somehow mysterious. I don't have the confidence that people have that it is one of us, though it is certainly a fact, that the embryo is a human being--just what a human being--the five-day-old embryo looks like what any human being looked like at five days old, there's no way around that.

On the other hand, it's the challenge that Jim Wilson posed, I think is a good one, we do not, somehow treat the demise of the five-day-embryo as we do the death of a child. And we don't react with the same kind of horror, maybe we should, at the dismemberment of what is a hundred cells and for the sake of saving lives, as we would if we simply killed a two-year-old child and remove the kidneys.

It my very well be that moral sentiment is a poor guide here. It may be. And let me shift slightly to that question and take it up tangentially. I'm sorry this is going to be somewhat incoherent, the order is going to be somewhat off.

I think repugnance is not the--not the absolutely firm guide in these matters, but it sure is a warning. And especially some of the deepest things are very hard to capture in precise and rational speech. We cannot give a rational speech to articulate the horror, which is father-daughter incest. If you tried to make the argument, you would imperil our conviction that this is somehow an abomination. I don't think you can make an argument as to what's wrong with rape or murder or cannibalism, these are things which are somehow our revulsion of these things is a guide that we're defending something there that is very deep.

Argument can come to the aid of this. Argument can especially come--try to come to the aid of this thing--these things in a culture where there's so much chatter that the rationalists tend to undermine our intuitions about these things. And if you live in an age in which--there is like no common sense of what is seemly and what is abominable and everything is somehow up for grabs, one is somehow left, if you can't get Joedy Bottum to go out on the stump with making arguments. Public discourse, I don't think, perhaps so much the worse for public discourse cannot, I think, conduct itself with that kind of rhetorical and prophetic kind of brilliance that we heard from Joedy.

So, where are we? It seems to me that these are questions, which are in a way bound up with the abortion controversy. There's no denying it and there are people who think that--and Joedy gave an expression to it--far worse to create nascent human life for to destroy it for the use of the living than it is to start down the road to baby manufacture and working our will on living children.

I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that death and destruction, horrible though they are, are old matters. And that what's really the wave of the future is not just the means--not just the immorality of the means that we use to gain these new powers, but the things that these new powers make possible in the forms of working our will upon untold future generations to turn them into creatures after our own image. And that, I think, is really novel and worth arguing about, independent of the question of the destruction of nascent life.

On the other hand, though I don't--I can't somehow believe that destroying an embryo is tantamount to murder. I'm always impressed with the people who bear witness on this subject, even if they're going to lose in the end because there is some kind of deep reverence for what our humanity is in its earliest form that the pro-life movement has somehow understood, has risen to defend. They are the only people in the community who, in fact, are willing to say no to anything. And I can't persuade myself that they're not right.

Let me say one thing. Diana, I don't know what to say to you. I mean, it's one of those wonderful moments where, if I might return a compliment, Leo Strauss' famous remark that one should always teach as if there were a silent student in the class that was one's superior in heart and in mind. I won't finish the thought, but it's perfectly clear, Diana, it was, I don't really know how to answer you. Everything turns on the question as to whether this really is something like slavery, and I can't persuade myself that it is.

To Charles Murray, I owe at least something. [Laugh-ter.] And maybe you're right that this is futile. But it--and here the discussion we've just had has some bearing. My interest in the subject of cloning goes beyond whether or not we practice cloning or we don't practice it. My interest is also in whether human beings, through their political institutions can gain at least some control over where biotechnology is taking us. And cloning is an absolutely marvelous example for the community to say, with one voice, never mind the cloning for biomedical research, which, alas, confounds this question. The cloning for biomedical research, really is a small piece of embryo research in general and one of the advantages of calling for a moratorium was separating these two questions so you could argue about cloning for biomedical research in the context of all embryo research. It will be no victory for the pro-life movement to ban the creation of cloned embryos for research and allow the creation of embryos by (inaudible) to go on in the private sector unregulated. That's no great triumph.

So, let's just talk about cloning for baby making. This is a great opportunity to shift the burden of proof from the opponents to the proponents of some kind of novelties to challenge deeply things that make us human.

Say to the people who want to produce cloned children, show us why this is a necessity. You have the obligation to say why this is somehow not just a whim, but something that the society should countenance. And we would shift the burden of proof if we, in fact had a legislative ban in this country, even if, in fact, there are renegade scientists elsewhere in the world who would practice it. So I--this is a wonderful occasion, at least to see whether, at least in this particular area, the community can exercise the will and discipline to make its moral voice heard and to set--and in a way to be a teacher as well as a guide to what can and can't go on.

Yes, Charles, sometimes I think this is a missed opportunity and what we really ought to do is to recognize that a society that is willing to kill none-month-old for any reason or no reason is not going to step back if it should turn out that five-day-old embryos hold the cure for Parkinson's disease. They're not going to restrain themselves on that. And, therefore, when I think like that, I say, look, what we really ought to do is find some kind of regulatory scheme, set a boundary, seven days, ten days beyond which it will not go. And do what the British have done and involve the biotech companies in this discussion because, after all, they have a stake in not unduly offending the moral sensibilities of the community. They will tell you privately, they'll get the money for their research, but what they're worried about, is bioethics. And if they have some kind of bioethical scandal, the money's going to dry up and the government's going to come down with rather drastic interventions as they did after the Tuskegee experiments and the like.

So, when I think like this, I'm saying, look, invite these people to the table. Try to devise some kind of regulations and system of oversight that they will live by. We'll let them do some things that make us uncomfortable in the hope that the worst kinds of disasters can be forfended.

No sooner than I get those words out of my mouth than I recognize that these boundary lines are moveable and that today it's stem cells and five years from now it's going to turn out that if you put these little embryos into a pig uterus and grow them up to two months, their kidneys and their primordial livers are going to be much more valuable than the stem cells. And by the principle that we've just established here, we will have endorsed that and this line will not hold.

And it seems to me that this desire to be reasonable when one is crossing rather large moral boundaries, is a counsel of reasonableness for now which we are likely to live to regret.

The last thing to say to you is I'm not quite so nihilistic about the possibility of some kind of intervention. We don't have a lot of precedent from this, though we do have in another area the precedent that we refuse--I'll set you off with this--we refuse to allow the buying and selling of organs for transplant, even though markets in organs would produce more organs. This is a proscription that might not last, I fear, bothersome we have it, at least, for the time being.

Moreover, many of the other nations, in fact, have enacted bans on cloning--on all cloning. And, in fact, there is a convention under deliberation in the U.N. right now, as to whether there can be an international ban on cloning. The French and the Germans want it on cloning to produce children only because they've got their own embryo laws in place at home. The United States is leading a coalition to try to produce the kind of ban that the President wants.

I don't see any reason why we shouldn't make every best effort on these kinds of matters to say, look, biotechnology is quite wonderful. There are many things that are coming, but the scientific community, in its own best interest will understand that it can proceed and progress within moral boundaries set by the moral norms of the international community. It's just not true that this research can't continue within certain kinds of moral boundaries, providing that they are not too horrendous. And it seems to me that this is the opportunity for the United States to be the leader in this area, rather than to be playing catch-up as we have been to this point.

Last comment for long-windedness. The last thing to say to you, Charles, also is that the United States is unlike, unless we step forward in this matter, to remain the center of ethical biotechnology. Yes, the Chinese might be to our left, but it's precisely because we are Americans; because we believe in progress; because most of us, in fact, believe that if it can be done, it will be done; because we believe in freedom of entrepreneurs of scientists of users; because we believe in compassionate humanitarianism as a kind of trumping moral value; because we believe in allowing industry to go where it will; because we're fairly tolerant people, I'm okay, you're okay, we're going to have a hell of a time being the moral teacher of the world in these matters, especially when the moral principles that govern here are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All of which--none of which are sufficient to step forward in the defense of human dignity, which is really the thing which is at issue here.

So, I'm not confident that just saying let things proceed as normal. Let them come over here and discover that we're not Chinese Communists, that we're decent folk, will guarantee it's the kind of restraint that we want.

That's not justice to any of you, but it's what a poor intelligence at this hour of the afternoon can muster.

MR. SNOW: That was ridiculously modest. Thank you. [Laughter.] What I want to do is give Charles Murray a chance to respond. I'm going to add one little thing to it. And then we will try--we have a very brief amount of time remaining for us. We have a roving microphone, put your hands up. What I would suggest is a question for a single panelist because if you have two questions and everybody answers it, we're all out of here. So try to figure out a way to make it fairly specific so that we can have as many questions.

Now, Charles, I want to let you respond to what Leon just said. But let me add one other thing, which is that you were arguing that people often commit the folly of making straight-line projections of what may or may not be possible; and they're usually wrong. We can thing about all the warnings about recombinant DNA and the ban in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until all of sudden it became profitable and the ban went away.

On the other hand, there's also straight-line projection in the other way. What makes you so certain that A) the technology will succeed, given the stupendous failure rate it has right now; and the costs associated with that; and B) if you have something that is as speculative in terms of its commercial potential, why, in fact, would there be hundreds of billions of dollars when you have a combination of a very high percentage failure rate, plus the kind of moral obloquy that may be visited upon anybody who actually intends to plow into that particular field?

So, I will add that to Leon Kass's comments and sit back and listen to the answer.

MR. MURRAY: Okay, I'll try to be short, since I am utterly incompetent to answer your last question, I should probably just say that and quit. But I will suggest that as far as I can tell, we don't have unknown unknowns in this science. Which is to say, in order to get rid of the failure rates; in order to make progress, I don't know of any areas--any lacuna which the scientists say, gee, maybe, once we know more about this, it'll turn out this stuff just isn't possible. That we're in the stage now of incremental filling out of science that is already in place. And the history of science tells me that once you got that, the difficulties will eventually go away.

The large point I would like to make--I will just simply say, let's see, Leon, we can get together and we can make a little bet, okay, afterwards about whether the nations of the world can stop this or even limit it or do anything and my bet will be this thing whatever it is is out of the bag. There's no putting it back, it's going to happen. It's going to happen within decades, at most, and some of it's going to happen within years and it's going to be an accelerated process.

But that's no what really, I want to emphasize. And Joedy and Diana, you forfeit any chance of talking to people who believe that they are right just as deeply that they are right just as deeply as you believe you're right; who believe they are moral and you are immoral, just as emphatically as you do--just as emphatically.

The idea that--elephants. Like as I said, you guys are on the losing side in the sense--and I mean that not gleefully at all. You're on the losing side numerically. The percentage of people who hold your position about the evil of dealing with hundred-cell blastocyts or however you pronounce it--you know, you're a tiny minority. You're a minority in the sense of not being able to--and by you, I mean, the folks who believe with you on these issues, and Leon, who is certainly a fellow traveller, maybe not all the way, with you. You're a minority in the sense that you don't have any control over the action. You have access to the levers of governmental authority to some degree. And you can mobilize a public opinion, which you can get a higher percentage of people to agree with you than you can within the scientific community. But since the action is going to be in the scientific community, for you to forfeit the chance to talk with people who believe just as deeply as you do that they are right, is, I think, to forfeit any chance of having an impact on all this.

MR. SNOW: Joedy and Diana, I want you to--

MR. BOTTUM: To quote that old windbag, William Jennings Bryan, "the humblest citizen in all the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the hosts of error." It is possible to move people in a certain way, but it also seems to me that the political life of America works in a way different than what you have conceived.

Those people of whom you are speaking are not listening to me anyway, no matter what language I use, they would, no matter how reasonable and civil I was, they would not sit down and converse with me nor compromise with me. If you notice, the people who were wiling to compromise on the Kass Commission, the people who were willing to compromise on the moratorium, were the people who were opposed to all cloning, not the people who were in favor of cloning. They got the moratorium by usurping the right onto the people in the middle ground, rather than the left, we can express it in right left distinctions here.

It seems to me that if we are going to get any compromise in the real political life of the nation, we need to have someone doing what William Lloyd Garrison did. We need to have somebody on the extreme shouting out that this is an outrage so that someone like Lincoln can come along and appear to be in the middle.

MS. SCHAUB: Yeah, I mean, I would refer to the statesmanship of Lincoln. He was, theoretically, absolutist, insisting that slavery was an evil and to that extent in agreement with the radical abolitionists. But he was more prudential when it came to practice. And it might be that, if we took seriously that example of Lincoln, we could, you know, find out when there are prudential compromises available.

MR. SNOW: By the way folks, if you have a question, keep--keep your hand up so that whoever--the mike can be quickly distributed to the next questioner.

MS. : Dr. Kass, you've acknowledged that there is, in general, among the population, a distinction in their sentiment or their feeling between the death of a five-day-old embryo and a newborn baby--that there just--there is that most people feel differently, a different state of mourning or loss between those two. What about the difference between a five-day-old embryo that exists in its mother's uterus and if left alone and not bothered, will develop into a unique human being made in the image of God and a five-day-old embryo in a Petri dish, which was the product of an IV (inaudible) procedure, which, if left to its own, will shrivel and die? Is there a distinction in how we feel about those two things or how we should think of them? That is the distinction that's made by the orthodox rabbinate, a group of people who are not careless or thoughtless in their moral thinking about how people might use or exploit other people or about the meaning of life and the preciousness of life.

DR. KASS: Thank you. That's also, I think, a difficult question. The--I'm not sure that the reverence or respect for nascent human life ought to be a function of where it happens to find itself. The embryos that are found in the Petri dish are there as a product of human will, they're indistinguishable, in fact, from the embryos that are inside and while no one may yet have the maternal investment in them, which sometimes is responsible for people valuing them more, it seems to me as the community that looks on nascent human life in a Petri dish and is somehow willing to say this is less than the other has already desensitized something in itself. That is to say, this is nascent human life, which, if people should treated it as one should treat nascent life, would have as much of a fighting chance to develop into a child as the embryo in uteral.

Now, the question is long and, I think, too complicated for the time we have left to talk about those frozen embryos in the in vitro clinic that are, so-called spare. More of them are created than were necessary because we're impatient and we want success as quickly as possible and one can't complain about that, exactly. But there are some people who think that, given that those embryos were created, as Joedy Bottum would have said, or might have said, all of them with the hope that this one might just become the child we're looking for. And one might deplore the fact that there are too many produced and that some will die, nevertheless, each one of those embryos in the in vitro laboratory was produced with the teleological intent, with the purpose of producing the child for the couple desperately wanting a child.

And, therefore, none of those embryos were, in fact, so that they could be a mere natural resource--in fact, none of them were produced as means merely. And then people might say, look, there's a sadness that more are produced than we need and they're going to die anyhow, couldn't their deaths somehow be redeemed and be used to help the living. That's, I think, the argument that they're going to die anyhow.

On the other hand, I don't think you want to endorse the principle that because someone's going to die anyhow or soon, that you're entitled to transgress against it or violate it for the sake of benefits to come. And it seems to me that, especially, if you're not confident about the ontological or moral status of the embryo, you want to give it the benefit of the doubt, and you don't want to corrupt yourself into thinking that you can use the seeds of the next generation to save this one with impunity. That I think is a counsel of principle prudence in the face of a certain kind of ignorance when one knows how easy it is for us to harden our hearts and to keep moving against the frontier and say, this year seven days, next year, two months.

So, with all due respect to the rabbis, whom I admire and the Halacha is silent on this question, I think if they were more careful about this, they might for prudential reasons want not to somehow give the green light to the use of the embryos in the freezers.

MS. : Question for Charles Murray. Your hope seems to be that if we don't futilely attempt to ban or legally regulate cloning that you will bring into being--you'll increase the chance of bringing into being a group of cloning researchers who are socialized into certain unspecified ethical norms. But by the logic of your argument that you can't stop progress, isn't that an illusion, too? I mean, that is the moment that the ethical norm prevents the realization of some financial or medical progress, wouldn't that ethical norm fall by the wayside? I mean, why is your answer any better than legal regulation?

MR. MURRAY: It isn't, really. [Laughter.] In the sense that I have no confidence whatsoever that this genie can be controlled. I have a very modest goal and that is to try to engage the science community that's involved with this in these issues--

[Technical interruption.]

MR. MURRAY: --political issues. A polarization has already occurred, whereby most members of that community look with disdain or contempt upon the arguments you have heard today; far more disdain and contempt than is warranted; and I think much of the source of a lot of that comes from some very human reactions, whereby these people are trying to get in the way of something that I'm doing and they're trying to say what I'm doing is wrong and what I am doing is good, how can anybody be so stupid as to think that?

And I think that, you know, the old story about, you know, if you are trying to make a bridge hand and you have a very long-shot way of making it, but that's the only way you can make the hand, then that's the way you play it. The only way you make this hand, and here's where I disagree with Joedy, I think about the political dialogue--you aren't going to get a political coalition to go anywhere close to where you would like to go or where the commission would like to go. You can increase the percentage from 5 or 10 percent, to 20 or 30 percent, depending upon what the issues is or, maybe, 40 percent, maybe you could, at the outside, make this as controversial as legalized abortion is, at the outside, if you're really lucky. But, you see, we still have legalized abortion.

The only game in town--the only way to make progress on this is somehow to get people who are doing this kind of work to come to grips with the very real problems that Leon and the Council are raising. And you don't do that by saying you're evil, you're evil, you're evil.

And, I guess, I'm troubled by--I'm troubled by the lack of complexity, I guess, Diana and Joedy, that I heard in your presentations. I just simply think these are more complicated than that. And it's not a matter of wishy-washiness, it's not a matter of relativism, it's a matter of moral issues that have dimensions that human beings have never had to confront before and they're only going to get worse.

And so there is another aspect to this dialogue and that is we would all benefit from it from hearing the point of view from the other side, as well, because there's lots of deeply difficult, important, profound statements to be made from the folks on both sides of this.

DR. KASS: Charles, I take your point. And it's for better and for worse, the reason for the spirit of discourse in the Council. But I think one has to own up to the fact that the country has been through a couple of years of very, very interesting and intense debate on bioethical topics; first on stem cells and then on cloning. And while Congress might not be the best place to think these issues through in the deepest way, the fact that Congress has made it a matter of public business, has, in fact, been responsible for the American people for the first time, as a nation, really seriously facing up to these biotechnological questions.

Remarkable, the National Academy of Sciences panel, last January, called for a legislative ban on cloning to produce children. They--that's the first time any group of respectable scientists in this country have said no to anything that scientists could do. And why did they do it? Because they were scared to death after the House passed the restrictive cloning ban. They made reproductive--or cloning to produce children a kind of sacrificial lamb in order to get some support so they could go ahead and do their research. But they are now in the conversation.

And the American people, by the way, are still, on the whole, opposed to creating embryos for the sole purpose of research. It's not that--I'm not sure that the outcome is yet known. The scientific community is where you say they are. And they're where they say you are because they don't like anybody telling them what to do; they are worried that this year it's cloned embryos and next year it's going to be all embryos and later on, who knows what, you know, what the new fundamentalists are going to do to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

But they're mistaken. And they're mistaken, in part, because this isn't just a bunch of conservative Republicans. The feminists didn't treat this as an abortion question. The votes in the Congress were not scored by NARAL, we had women from the--now testifying in favor of a comprehensive cloning ban. The conversation hasn't gone far enough to see where the country's going to come out on this one. And I think it's too early to declare that the community will not ask of the scientists, look, we've entered into a moral social contract with you. We've given you prestige; we give you money; we give you honor; we esteem the benefits you provide for us. But that contract is fundamentally a moral one. And that when you cross certain kinds of boundaries dear to the community, you have to expect that the community is going to hold you to account and set certain kinds of boundaries. That hasn't been done before, but it's going to be done in this area and I think the scientists who were farsighted on this will not simply circle the wagons any time somebody comes forward and says you really shouldn't be doing this. They're going to enter into that discussion and are going to try to craft boundaries that they as human beings and citizens and not just as scientists are going to be comfortable living with.

MR. : Bill Galston, you were talking about the difference between the Aristotelian and Kantian conceptions of morality. First think I want to do--get you to make a commitment on which you endorse in this particular case because you were wonderful in dissecting the debate. I'm a little murky on your taking sides. I think I saw a little bit, got a glimpse, I believe, in your parting comments, where you might stand. But I'd like to hear you flesh it out a bit. And should there be any moral--categorical imperatives come to this issue?

MR. GALSTON: Well, this is the kind of question you don't get a chance to ask on Sunday morning very often. [Laughter.] I say that as a faithful watcher. Let--yeah well, you know, as a lot of people say in this town, I'm glad you asked.

And here's why--I think that the following view is closest to the truth. And that is that the rules that we regard as absolute prohibitions and set forth for very good reasons as absolute prohibitions; and cheer when the rabbis build fences around the Torah at ever greater radii away from the core. Those are, in my judgment, moral rules of thumb that can be overridden in cases of extreme emergency, but not otherwise. To use the language that Leon quoted from the report, those purportedly absolute rules dramatically shift the burden of proof to those who would violate them. But it is almost always, well, let me not be mealymouthed, I think it is always, in principle, possible to think of emergency exceptions.

And let me give you an example from last week's Torah portion. You asked. You know, there is, among other things, the story of Lot's daughters, all right? And as all the Biblically literate in the room will know, you know, after the destruction of Sodom, they believed that their father was the last man left on earth. And so, they deliberately got him drunk to commit incest with him, you know, a grave, grave principle violated. The Bible conspicuously refrains through silence from either condemning that or imposing any punishment on them. And, indeed, the products of those incests became too great and not all together evil tribes, you know, of whom much was heard later.

Now, does that mean that it is wrong to put forward an incest prohibition? No. Does that mean that it's wrong to put forward all sorts of prohibitions? Absolutely not. But I believe that the question, yeah, the possibility of an emergency override is ever present and as long as we stay clear as to who really has th burden of proof to discharge, I think we'll be on good moral ground.

MR. : This gets you into an intriguing debate, however, because you get a chicken and egg problem, almost literally, which is: In the case of, what again is medical research cloning.

MR. GALSTON: Yes.

MR. : You're not going to have proof until you commit something which the commission says, I don't know about it. Correct? So, in other words, you can't figure out whether to break that--you can't figure out whether you need to break the glass and get the emergency axe or whatever it might be until you've already committed the act it somewhat prohibits. So, again, where do you stand on that?

MR. GALSTON: Let me--let me answer with an analogy. And that is I'm viscerally opposed to torture. Can I stand before you and say that no government in an emergency situation would ever be justified in employing it as an instrument of state policy? No, I can't say that, all right? And many, many governments--many, many governments, regrettably, are faced with that sort of choice.

Now, is it better to have broad rules out there in the international community? Is it better to have international laws that lean very strongly against that, even towards prohibition? Yes, it is, but I think if we're thinking politically and not just morally--if we're thinking about political ethics and not just moral philosophy done in the seminar room, we have to be aware of the circumstances that rebut even the most powerful presumptions. And, you know, I may be shocking a nationwide audience by saying this, but I genuinely believe that to be the case.

And what we're talking about in this report is not just a matter of armchair morality. We're talking about political morality. We're talking about the translation of moral views into public policy with coercive power. We must think politically. And so, I think we have to be open to the full moral complexity of the situation. That's the best I can do.

DR. KASS: Two things: First of all, the situation we're facing in cloning for biomedical research is not like the situation of last human being on earth where you can find some kind of compelling reason for overturning what was, by the way, not at that point a law, I mean, in fact, in passing, Bill, if you're going to cite the Bible in support of Aristotelian prudence, you should read Leviticus 18, where--

MR. GALSTON: Now, we're really into it. [Laughter.]

DR. KASS: --no, no, I mean that is--scripture is not going to come down on the side of saying that there are no unbreakable rules. And on this subject, you know this better than I. But the Torah had, of course, not been given and Lot and his Daughters came from a notoriously unsavory place. [Laughter.] But--

MR. GALSTON: The Lord elected to spare them, as I recall, Leon.

MR. SNOW: For Abraham's sake, not for their own merit, that's for another conversation. I couldn't resist. But look, yes, there are going to be exceptional circumstances in which principle is put to the test and that one sometimes might be compelled to sin and one should sin bravely and know that one is sinning and be willing to pay the price--be willing to pay the price and recognize it.

But I don't think in this business we're in the same place. There are alternative morally unproblematic means to pursue. There is no evidence at the moment that cloning for therapeutic purposes is going to cure anybody or anything. This has been asserted, really, on the basis of some speculative promise and because people don't want any kind of restrictions.

If you're going to say--if you say to me, look, we've got a plague in the country and everybody is dying of some kind of dread disease--I'll make it a case like yours. And it turns out that the only way you're going to stop this disease--the only way you're going to stop this disease is by creating embryos who have somehow the cure for it. Then I'll talk to you. but I'm not willing to cross these kinds of moral boundaries treating the imperfect duty with perhaps of curing certain kinds of diseases that may or may not be curable only by this means when there's absolutely no evidence for it and say, for the sake of that kind of speculative promise, I should not start creating nascent human life for the purposes of experimentation. I don't see it. As a rule of thumb.

MR. GALSTON: May I just say that I think that this is the real debate. All right? I think the real debate is the showing that has to be made, you know, in order to set aside a range of reservations which, I think have real bite. That's the debate.

MR. : I have a question to Dr. Kass on this issue of putting the principle to the test. What does he suppose will happen to the debate if an English group report that they have developed something from cloning that will cure 80 percent of Alzheimer's disease? There's an Australian group reporting that they have found something which will cure Parkinson's disease. What will happen to the debate here in the country?

DR. KASS: The Australian's won't do it because they banned cloning. And here's there's a kind of empirical question as to whether this is likely to happen. It might be unstoppable, Charles, but I don't think it's going to work. But that's another matter.

No, I think the pressure to take advantage of any kind of genuine cures from these horrible diseases. And let's be clear, these are horrible diseases and horrible not just to the people who have them, but to everybody who loves them and cares for them and whose life is affected by it. Let's not be casual about that.

The pressure to make use of the technologies in those cases will be enormous. And, I mean, it was remarkable last year in the House of Representatives, that people stood up on the floor, this was in July, in the cloning debate in the House. People stood up on the floor and said, if you stop this research, people are going to die. We've got cures for these diseases, and for the first time in American national public life, that argument didn't win. There were sufficient arguments; sufficiently mobilized to say there are other values important for us to uphold.

Whether the argument would have come out the same way if, in fact, that there were published reports that, you know what, these particular embryonic lines, these cell lines from cloned embryos are really the cure for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. The outcome would have been different. I think you can bet on it.

MR. BOTTUM: Leo, I mean, there are also other principles lose in the world, other moral imaginations, beginning with the prophetic one that says, let justice be done, though the heavens fall. If it is wrong to kill babies, then it is simply wrong to kill babies. And if that brings about the end of the world, so be it. Now, that's a moral imagining, I know, that's extremely alien to Bill Galston, but it seems to me that we can't account for America's moral life without knowing that that impulse is present here, too, that that runs--that impulse runs through our public life, as well. We are not all by national nature, utilitarians. And, in fact, certain principles have to be around for us to use them as the touchstones, whereby we tell whether other moral propositions are going to stand up or not. the danger when Peter Singer [ph] says, well, you know, we really should be able to kill two-mont-old babies--babies two months out of the womb, we should be able to kill them if their lives have proved unpleasant to us or to them. The danger there is not that we, as a nation are going to affirm what he said, because we're not.

The danger is by raising that question from a public position at Princeton University, he has brought into question and debate at all the idea that it is bad to kill babies. And suddenly we no longer have that touchstone with which to measure the truth of other moral propositions that we are offered.

MR. GALSTON: Well, it's not William Jennings Bryan I'm afraid of, it's William Lloyd Garrison. And so let me put his spirit on the table. I believe it was William Lloyd Garrison who said, repeatedly, you know, in the same way that Cato the Elder, who bored all of the Senate with his incessant repetition that Carthage must be destroyed, William Lloyd Garrison repeated for a decade, wayward sisters go in peace. Right. He was so--he was so offended by the violation of the moral law that he was prepared to wash his hands of slavery. He was prepared to consign the slaves, you know, in what became the Confederacy to permanent servitude because of his moral fanaticism, to put it bluntly.

The difference between William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln was that Garrison was a dangerous fanatic and Abraham Lincoln was a great man.

Mr. : There was a biography two years of William Lloyd Garrison, a brilliant biography, I--the historian's name escapes me, it was called "All On Fire," which argued that Garrison, in fact, knew precisely what he was doing all along. He was trying to make the extreme visible so that what was previously thought to be the extreme, namely, the Lincolnian position, would look like a moderate middle ground and that he did so deliberately and with open eyes. He was trying to extend political discourse so that the Lincolns who came along, whoever it was going to be, whether it was Freemont or Lincoln or whoever it would be, would look like a moderate.

MR. : That's what you're doing with Leon.

MR. : It is to some degree. It is also one of the problems when--it is also one of the problems when the President appoints a commission and the commission takes a position more politique and political than he does. In other words, it doesn't give him cover for him to come along and say, aha, you know, I'm the politician here, let's take the middle ground. He finds himself having to chase after the extreme because the committee broke down and didn't produce the Garrisonian position for him to appear Lincolnian.

MR. : I think it is fitting that we--while Leon Kass has the last word as long as we don't get too deeply involved in the live and times of William Lloyd Garrison.

DR. KASS: No, one comment, really, to this last exchange and then just a final comment. I think Joedy, one of the things that's remarkable about the discussion in this report is that it is the first time that any official government body has made the case for the embryo. You'll find no previous bioethics commission. They've never had anybody on those commissions--they had maybe one who could write a dissenting opinion.

But the case against biomedical research--and, by the way Diana, I happen to agree with you. I think that if a fair-minded person reading through the arguments here, who was not previously committed one place or another would, I think, think that the case against was the superior case, as made in the document. I recommend that you read it and see if we're right on that. I mean, we've, in a way, trusted to the power of the argument. But the argument against cloning for biomedical research in which Gil Milander, who is one of the most eloquent and most deeply thoughtful writers in bioethics had a major hand, is as good a statement against that kind of activity as you're going to find. And thanks to the President's appointment of Gil Milander to this Council, and others like him, that position has now been rendered respectable in bioethical circles and in public life in a way in which it wasn't before.

You now don't have just the people coming in from the National Right to Life making the argument and being allowed to be dismissed, but precisely because this is a report which is not written at all in theological language, but written in the language of public discourse, that position has not been, I think, given a kind of strength. It's not Jeremiah and it's not Garrison, but it's not nothing. And let's hope that it contributes to the seriousness of the discussion.

As to the last comment, it really is to the seriousness of our taking up these matters that the report is most of all dedicated. And if conversations of the sort that my colleagues and moderator on the panel have helped to generate here--the kind of serious reflecti