FORMER KASS COUNCIL MEMBER ELIZABETH BLACKBURN writes in the Washington Post that the Council is getting narrower as the result of politics:

When I read the council’s first discussion documents, my heart sank. The language was not what I was used to seeing in scientific discourse — it seemed to me to present pre-judged views and to use rhetoric to make points. Still, the debates we had in the ensuing months proved far-ranging, and all comments were politely received. And, despite the betting of outsiders, 10 of the council’s 17 members (one had retired) initially voted against recommending a ban on therapeutic cloning. A late change to the question being voted on turned the minority who were in favor of a ban into a majority of 10 favoring a four-year moratorium, an option the council had not discussed in meetings. But the report issued in July 2002 contained a breadth of views. It also contained a series of personal statements by council members, many of them dissenting from the report’s official recommendations.

In the year and a half following that report, I began to sense much less tolerance from the chairman for dissenting views. . . .

When I read the published views of the three new members (bringing the council up to its original total of 18 members), it seemed to me they represented a loss of balance in the council, both professionally and philosophically. None was a biomedical scientist, and the views of all three were much closer to the views espoused by Kass than mine or May’s were. One, a surgeon who was not a scientist, had championed a larger place for religious values in public life. Another was a political philosopher who had publicly praised Kass’s work; the third, a political scientist, had described research in which embryos are destroyed as “evil.”

Interesting.