Lively debate launches discussions of biomedical research

The President's Council on Bioethics opened deliberations to a mix of praise and criticism -- not unlike the issues it is charged with addressing.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. March 11, 2002.

It's not often the word "yuck" gets used so much in describing discussions on life-and-death issues, but that's what's happening with the opening meetings of President Bush's council on bioethics.

Actually, it's "the yuck factor," a term being used to either explain or belittle a philosophy expressed by council chair Leon Kass, MD, PhD. In his work "The Wisdom of Repugnance," the University of Chicago professor basically states that, if a person's first reaction to a biomedical breakthrough (such as cloning) is repulsion, maybe there's a good reason.

In addition to injecting "yuck" into the modern scientific vocabulary (entering "Kass" and "yuck" into the Yahoo search engine yields more than 70 matches), Dr. Kass also made waves by kicking off the council's deliberation on 21st century biomedical marvels with a discussion of 19th century literature, specifically, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark."

Written in the 1840s, the story tells of a scientist who unintentionally kills his beautiful wife while obsessed with removing a birthmark from her face.

According to council member William F. May, PhD, ethics professor emeritus at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, the story "sheds light on two powerful human experiences: the drive for perfection and the struggle with the unelected marks that go with our birth." And, in the process, it symbolizes the work that lies ahead for the panel as it attempts to help President Bush and others forge federal policies on cloning, stem cell research and other bioethical issues. [...]