"This transcript has not been edited or corrected, but rather appears as received from the commercial transcribing service. Accordingly, the President's Council on Bioethics makes no representation as to its accuracy."
FIRST MEETING
Friday, January 18, 2002
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Leon R. Kass, M.D., PH.D., Chairman
CHAIRMAN KASS: The
agenda for today is as announced in the briefing book. We will have Sessions
5 and 6 of this meeting, both on human cloning. The first, from now until
about 10 o'clock, on the ethical issues, the ethical issues in clonal
reproduction, and then, after the break, the policy issues in clonal reproduction
and opening discussion on research cloning. After the break, at noon,
we will have a final session for public comments, and I do not know--
Have people signed up already? Anyone who would like to make a public
comment should please notify Diane Gianelli who is in the back of the
room, our communications director.
Yesterday we spent most of our time on questions related to how to do
bioethics in the hope that we could enrich the consideration of these
questions, beginning with a discussion of The Birth-mark, exploring the
aspiration to perfection and its problems and limits. Then we went on
to Gil Meilaender's paper which raised a series of questions, talked about
certain aspects of the character of human life that are relevant to consideration
of bioethical issues. And then, in a somewhat loose and chaotic discussion,
we tried to talk about the context into which human cloning fits by having
discussion about the meaning of human procreation and what one might value
there.
I think had we followed Michael Sandel's original suggestion to begin,
really, with the objections to cloning, we might have gotten farther in
the search for what we positively affirm about this, in the way in which
one generally does not think about health until one has to confront disease,
and then one comes to think about what it is that one is missing. But
this morning's session, I think, is the opportunity at least to do that
head-on.
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