Bush’s Council on Bioethics Makes Toothless Attack on New Stem Cell Policy

Yesterday, the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, released a statement authored by members of the President’s Council on Bioethics critiquing the Obama administration’s stem cell policy. [Clarification: The statement appeared on the Center's Bioethics Forum, but does not represent the position of the Hastings Center itself, nor does publication there represent an endorsement of the statement.] What the authors failed to explain in either the statement or the accompanying press release is that the current members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were appointed by George W. Bush, and will serve until the charter for the council expires in September. The critique, in effect, is an echo from the past.

The 10 advisers who signed on to the statement, which includes a separate personal statement from chairman Edmund D. Pellegrino, are all identified as council members. But again, the authors fail to indicate that the documents are not official council communications. Go to the council website, bioethics.gov, and you’ll find transcripts of the council’s March 12-13 meetings, but won’t find any indication of the statement.

The statement itself raises three objections to the new policy on federal funding for stem cell research, all of which are unsubstantial. The point summaries come from the press release:

“The policy under President Bush was inaccurately characterized.”

This critique relies on the content of President Obama’s remarks on March 9, when he announced the new policy. In his opening sentence he said: “we will lift the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research.” We could go back and forth with the statement authors on what they find “promising” about throttling access to funding for research on viable cell lines, or we can simply refer to the document that matters, the Executive Order Obama issued spelling out the new policy, which reads:

For the past 8 years, the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to fund and conduct human embryonic stem cell research has been limited by Presidential actions.  The purpose of this order is to remove these limitations on scientific inquiry, to expand NIH support for the exploration of human stem cell research, and in so doing to enhance the contribution of America’s scientists to important new discoveries and new therapies for the benefit of humankind.

It is ironic that the statement dwells so heavily on Obama’s spoken remarks as opposed to the legally binding Order explaining the policy because the Bush policy the council members revere was never actually codified in an Executive Order or in proposed legislation. It was promulgated only through his televised remarks on September 9, 2001, and in a “Fact Sheet” subsequently circulated to the media.

“President Bush’s policy was advancing research within ethical norms more effectively than President Obama’s will.”

Simply put, the Bush policy delayed research, and advances in creating induced pluripotent cells “depended entirely on previous embryonic stem cell research,” according to James A. Thomson, the University of Wisconsin scientist who originally isolated human embryonic stem cells, and Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Moreover, there were serious ethical problems with the Bush policy, as a Hastings Center report from last year determined that “nearly one quarter of the colonies of human embryonic stem cells that the Bush administration had approved as ethically derived and eligible for study with federal funds” did not meet basic requirements for informed consent.

“The risk of reproductive cloning still must be addressed.”

That’s part of what the National Institutes of Health will address in its rulemaking process that extends 120 days from the release of the Executive Order. Again, the method of dissemination for Bush’s stem cell policy ignored such a rulemaking process, which is part of what may have led to the initial assumption that 60 hESC lines were available for funding when in fact there were only 21—5 of which were unethically derived.

The members of the council are hardly the only advisers within the executive branch still in their positions from the Bush administration, but to those citizens who aren’t following the intimate machinations of the ongoing transition, failing to make that clear in a public communication attacking an unfinalized policy of the current administration is confusing at best.

Tags: bioethics, stem cells

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