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DR. LEON KASS AN EXCEPTIONALLY PRINCIPLED SCIENTIST

Wall Street Journal portrait of head of President's Council on Bioethics

NEW YORK, Aug 15, 2001 (LSN.ca) - An article by Bret Stephens in Today's Wall Street Journal presents a fascinating portrait of Dr. Leon Kass, recently appointed by President Bush to head up the new President's Council on Bioethics which will monitor stem cell research.

Stephens, a University of Chicago graduate, states that Kass' deeply serious seminars at the university "served as a kind of church in which we came to understand that one could not be intellectually respectable without being morally so".

Kass is described as a high level M.D., biochemist and researcher who has curiously "spent much of his career raising seemingly abstruse moral objections to the whole thrust of the modern scientific enterprise... Thus he has questioned the uses of in vitro fertilization; opposed the substitution of the Hippocratic Oath--with its injunction against abortion--with the American Medical Association's more anodyne version; decried the growing acceptability of euthanasia; and, most recently, argued strenuously against even basic research into human cloning.

Regarding his role as head of the president's bioethics council, Stephen's reports "it is not Dr. Kass's intention to serve as the country's 'ethics cop,' 'The task that's been assigned to us,' he says, 'is not to make arrests and catch scientists. The task is to clarify the issues, to lift the public understanding of the human and moral significance of doing what we're doing.' His council, he promises, will not be 'stacked with like-minded people.'"

(With files from Pro-Life Infonet)

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