Thursday, September 4, 2003

CHAIRMAN KASS:  Welcome, Council members, to this, our 13th meeting.  Welcome also to members of the public.  I will recognize the presence of Dean Clancy, our Executive Director, in whose presence this is a legally constituted meeting.

The Council is moving toward completing three of its major projects, two of which are the subject of this meeting:  today monitoring stem cell research, tomorrow biotechnology and public policy.

The four sessions today are all related to the stem cell project, about which I would like to offer a few general remarks in order to clarify our task and where we are going.

As everyone knows, this Council was brought into being in connection with President Bush's August 2001 decision to permit for the first time limited federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research.

Although the President's charge to the Council in the executive order that created us was very broad, he also specifically charged us in his national address with "monitoring stem cell research."

And monitoring is just what we have been doing for these past 20 months.  We have been watching, we have been paying attention to, we have been gathering information about all the relevant happenings, not only the developments in scientific research but also the developments in ethics, law, and policy that have taken place since August 2001 under and in relation to the current federal policy.

We have commissioned papers reviewing stem cell research over the past two years, both embryonic and non.embryonic, discussed at the last meeting.  We have commissioned a paper on efforts to solve the problem with immune rejection, for now a major obstacle to many potential clinical applications of ESC research.  We have commissioned papers on recent ethical writings and discussions as well as on recent changes in state law.

We have heard a presentation about and kept abreast of the implementation of the federal stem cell funding policy by the NIH.  And later today we will hear more about efforts to move research from the bench to the bedside, both through federally funded research conducted by and administered through the NIH and eventually regulated by the FDA and through privately funded research conducted by industry or supported by private philanthropic organizations.

In a word, we have been trying to learn just what is happening as a consequence of or in relation to the current national policy in this area.  By the end of today's meeting, we will have completed this round of our monitoring and we will move toward preparing our report provisionally titled "Monitoring Stem Cell Research."

In this report, we will convey what we discovered by monitoring all of these fronts as they have developed these past two years under the present policy.  We owe the President and the nation an update on how this policy has been implemented and what is happening beneath and around its aegis.  Our report, as currently envisioned, will include chapters reviewing the scientific findings and the ethical discussions preceded by an explication of the policy and its moral and legal underpinnings.

The review essays that we have commissioned will be included in an appendix, which will also offer a primer on the human embryo.  And it is our hope to have drafts of these materials to you soon.

To monitor events under the present funding policy, it makes sense to begin by making sure that we understand what that policy is.  Although the matter might seem on the surface to be quite simple, public discussions of the policy over the past two years have been anything but clear or accurate with much understanding and not a little misrepresentation on all sides.  If we were to do nothing else, clarification of where things stand and why legally and morally would be a significant contribution.  The two sessions this morning aim at that goal, the first indirectly by way of discussing in general the meaning of federal funding, the second directly by examining the policy itself.

The controversial moral, political issue in the public stem cell debate that was informed by other moral disagreements was about government funding, not as in the cloning debate about a government.imposed ban with criminal penalties.

In the stem cell case, the issue is about whether or not government funds will be available for a certain area of contested research.  In the cloning case, the issue is whether research or reproductive activities should be forbidden or criminalized.

Everyone readily understands the meaning of a criminal ban, but the meaning of awarding or withholding government support is less well-known. And no previous bioethics council, to my knowledge, has ever taken up the subject thematically.  To enable us to do so, we have commissioned a paper by political theorist Professor Peter Berkowitz of the George Mason University Law School, the Hoover Institution, and happily part.time senior consultant to this Council, the paper on the meaning of federal funding.

The discussion we are about to have with Peter's help doubles as a contribution also to a richer bioethics, seeing as it takes up certain important political, philosophical issues of morals and politics in a liberal pluralistic society.

We welcome Peter to the meeting, thank him for his paper, and look forward to his presentation and the subsequent discussion.

PROF. BERKOWITZ:  First, thank you, Leon, for the invitation to discuss the meaning of federal funding with this distinguished group.