RON BAILEY REPORTS that James Q. Wilson has resigned from the President’s Bioethics Council. No word on why, but Bailey observes:

Two of the seven members of the Council who voted in favor of proceeding immediately with therapeutic cloning to produce human embryonic stem cells are already gone–Wilson’s departure makes it a third.

Council Chairman Leon Kass replaced the two earlier dissenters with three tractable bioconservative intellectuals whose views on bioethics Kass finds less challenging. The question is will Wilson’s replacement be yet another bioconservative clone?

I’ve been critical of the Council in the past, here and here, though it’s worth noting that Wilson emailed me to defend Kass a time or two. Here’s the advice I offered Kass, at the beginning.