2002 Reinventing the image of God

Week-end edition of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting interview with Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, by Bret Stephens. It begins with a discussion of Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean researcher who has admitted to fabricating cloned stem cells. The media were complicit in the fraud, he believes.

"As far as Dr. Hwang is concerned, Dr. Kass is merciless, and he fires grapeshot: "Scientific fraud is always revolting, but it is fortunately rare and, in the end, truth will out. But in this case, American scientists and the American media have been complicit in the fraud, because of their zeal in the politics of stem-cell and cloning research and their hostility to the Bush funding policy. Concerted efforts have been made these past five years to hype therapeutic cloning, including irresponsible promises of cures around the corner and 'personalized repair kits' for every degenerative disease. The need to support these wild claims and the desire to embarrass cloning opponents led to the accelerated publication of Dr. Hwang's 'findings.' . . . We even made him Exhibit A for the false claim that our moral scruples are causing American science to fall behind."

The article also includes his concerns about performance enhancing drugs, psychotropic behavior modifying drugs, life-span increasing drugs, and living wills. Read the article here.