Con­ser­v­a­tives Draft a ‘Bioethics Agen­da’ for Pres­i­dent (washingtonpost.com):

The loose-knit group of about a dozen peo­ple — large­ly spear­head­ed by Leon R. Kass, chair­man of the Pres­i­den­t’s Coun­cil on Bioethics, and Eric Cohen, edi­tor of the New Atlantis, a con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal of tech­nol­o­gy and soci­ety — have been meet­ing since Decem­ber. Their goal, accord­ing to a doc­u­ment cir­cu­lat­ing among mem­bers and oth­ers, is to devise “a bold and plau­si­ble ‘offen­sive’ bioethics agen­da” to replace a con­gres­sion­al strat­e­gy that has been “too nar­row­ly focused and insuf­fi­cient­ly ambitious.”

The strat­e­gy is to sep­a­rate cloning and stem cell research, a blow to the strat­e­gy Sam Brown­back has followed.

Roger Pielke thinks that Kass is abus­ing his posi­tion. Essen­tial­ly, Kass is using his sta­tus as leader of the Pres­i­den­t’s Bioethics pan­el to push a sep­a­rate agen­da, as if it were the pan­el’s find­ing. Leo Kass was a pop­u­lar pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, and it’s a shame to see him abus­ing his sta­tus like this.

Why are peo­ple so afraid of embry­on­ic stem cells? Why can’t the bioethi­cists focus on cre­at­ing rules on the eth­i­cal use and pro­duc­tion of embry­on­ic cells?

Is this anti-sci­ence, or is it a dif­fer­ent view of science?