We all have a great deal to be thankful this Thanksgiving, and now we have one more thing to add to our list: another presidential bioethics commission. President Obama has made good on the implicit and then explicit promise to put bioethics not only into the White House but the Executive branch more generally. PCSBI. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Known by any other name (or acronym), it’s simply too much of a mouthful.
Apart from the Chair, Amy Gutmann, bioethicist and president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Vice Chair, James Wagner, Emory University’s widely praised president, the membership of the commission remains a mystery, the sort of thing bioethicists like me wager about. Doubtless Robert George and William Hurlbut won’t be on anyone’s short list this time around, but they will have plenty to carp about in The New Atlantis.
Summer Johnson, PhD