From the moment the White House announced the members Bush had chosen for his panel on bioethics, in January 2002, the council has been criticized by advocates of embryonic stem cell research. Leon Kass, Bush's handpicked chairman, is at the center of the storm. Kass, who has a medical degree as well as a graduate degree in biochemistry, has written frequently of the "repugnance" he feels toward new biotechnologies and other manipulations of the body. Kass has problems with, among other things, "dissection of cadavers, organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery, body shops, laboratory fertilization, surrogate wombs, gender-change surgery," he wrote in his book "Toward a More Natural Science." In "The Hungry Soul," a philosophical meditation on eating, he expressed his dissatisfaction with "uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone -- a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive," a citation that bloggers have had some fun with.

Bush picked other prominent conservative thinkers as members of the council -- the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, for instance, and the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. But the council can't be called a conservative group. Many of its members have no discernible ideological bent, and in its meetings (transcripts of which are posted on its site) and its reports, the council does not come across as homogenous; members are often at odds over small points and large ones, and Kass, as chairman, is keen to hear all sides.

"This has been the most interesting intellectual experience I have ever had," says Rebecca Dresser, a professor at the Washington University School of Law who is a member of the council. "That's because it's so diverse in terms of moral views and related political views."

Elizabeth Blackburn is the only member of the panel to publicly claim that the council was run unfairly -- and she did so only after she was let go. In a piece published on March 12 in the online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, Blackburn wrote that when she was first invited by the White House to sit on the council, her inclination was to decline. She changed her mind only after Kass and Bush personally assured her that the council was eager to receive "the wisdom of a full range of experts," she wrote. But Blackburn says that members of the council soon found Kass unwilling to accept competing views. "Time and time again, other members of the council, including those who were initially skeptical about the potential of stem-cell research," urged "the chairman to account fully and fairly for the potential of this research to alleviate human suffering," she wrote.

Yet none of the members of the council, even those on Blackburn's side in the debate, would corroborate this view for Salon; several members praised Kass' management style. "I think Leon Kass runs the council very fairly," said William Hurlbut, a bioethicist at Stanford who is on the council. Blackburn declined to be interviewed for this article (an aide at UCSF said Blackburn wants to get back to her work), so it's hard to tell where exactly she saw Kass' slant come in.

In an article in the journal PLoS Biology, Blackburn and Janet Rowley, a cell biologist at the University of Chicago and a member of the council, cited a few specific problems they had with "Monitoring Stem Cell Research," the report the council produced on stem cells. Their complaints are technical, but they essentially argue that the council played up the promise of adult stem cells (cells that can be obtained without the destruction of embryos) and did not fully emphasize the promise of embryonic stem cells. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Blackburn went further, saying that the council's reports carried "this strong implication that medical research is not what God intended, that there is something unnatural about it."

"I regarded that as a bizarre comment about the council reports," says Gilbert Meilaender, a professor of Christian ethics at Valparaiso University and a member of the council who has tended to side with Kass. "I wouldn't mind being quoted as saying it was bizarre -- there may be many defects with the reports, but they do not carry the strong implication that medical research is not what God intended."

In an interview conducted by e-mail, Kass was equally critical of Blackburn's comments on the report. (Editor's note: Dr. Kass agreed to be interviewed on the condition that his response be published in its entirety.)

"Dr. Blackburn's quoted remarks about the stem cell report astonish me," he wrote. "For one thing, Dr. Blackburn signed the stem cell report without dissent, and did not take advantage of the opportunity (that she knew she had) to enter her personal dissenting statement into the report itself, disagreeing either in whole or in part. More important, what she says about the report itself is wildly mistaken. 'Monitoring Stem Cell Research' is an update on what has transpired in the past two years, both in basic and clinical research and in the ethical and policy debates surrounding the current federal funding policy. We commissioned seven scientific review articles -- on various aspects of current stem cell research -- from leading stem cell researchers, including John Gearhart and James Thomson, the discoverers of human embryonic stem cells, and those review articles are published in their entirety in the report. The staff-written chapter on 'Scientific Developments,' drafted by our scientific director Dr. Richard Roblin, was gone over not only by the members of the Council, including Dr. Blackburn; it was reviewed by three major outside stem cell researchers (including Dr. Gearhart), all of whom pronounced the treatment fair, careful, and accurate, and whose small suggestions for change we took in toto."

Kass said that "only on one point did we not accept Dr. Blackburn's own suggestions for change: Dr. Blackburn wanted the scientific chapter to issue in a political conclusion, namely, that we now know that embryonic stem cells are more valuable than adult stem cells. But we felt that the scientific evidence to date makes such a conclusion premature at best.

"The purpose of our stem cell report was not to lobby one way or the other but to monitor the state of the research. Anyone reading the transcripts of our meetings and the text of our report will find not one iota of evidence to support the claim that I or other Council members reject stem cell science, ignore its enormous potential to heal disease and relieve suffering, or proceed in these discussions on the basis of 'visceral reactions.' For the record, I am in favor of stem cell research and have said so publicly. It is easy to hurl charges; it is more responsible to read and judge on the evidence. Let people read the record and not rely on unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable charges."

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