Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President's Council On Bioethics

by Leon R. Kass

Few avenues of scientific inquiry raise more thorny ethical questions than the cloning of human beings, a radical way to control our DNA. In August 2001, in conjunction with his decision to permit limited federal funding for stem-cell research, President George W. Bush created the President's Council on Bioethics to address the ethical ramifications of biomedical innovation. Over the past year the Council, whose members comprise an all-star team of leading scientists, doctors, ethicists, lawyers, humanists, and theologians, has discussed and debated the pros and cons of cloning, whether to produce children or to aid in scientific research. This book is its insightful and thought-provoking report.

The questions the Council members confronted do not have easy answers, and they did not seek to hide their differences behind an artificial consensus. Rather, the Council decided to allow each side to make its own best case, so that the American people can think about and debate these questions, which go to the heart of what it means to be a human being. Just as the dawn of the atomic age created ethical dilemmas for the United States, cloning presents us with similar quandaries that we are sure to wrestle with for decades to come.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Biology, Philosophy

400 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the "Great Books," as an opponent of human cloning, life extension and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research, and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist.

Reviews

[BBBTerri · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you wonder where you stand on human cloning used for biomedical research or cloning used for procreation, aren't sure what it's all about, how it works and want to educate yourself so you can make an informed decision for yourself. This is an excellent "unbiased" book. It covers EVERY ethical point from liberal to conservative, religious to atheistic.

In Aug 2001 Pres. George W Bush created the President's Council on Bioethics made up of scientists, doctors, lawyers, theologians, humanists etc discussing and debating the pros and cons of cloning.

If you want to understand the historic and scientific background of human cloning. The different aspects of how it can be useful and the ethics of cloning-to produce-children vs cloning for biomedical research, you should read this book.

[Bhakta Kishor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure that if you're interested in cloning, you've heard of Dolly the sheep, the first large mammal to be made a genetic clone of another sheep. The scientists who made Dolly followed a process that works well in some animals, but considerably less well in others. They removed the DNA from a sheep ovum, fused the ovum with a mammary epithelial cell from an adult "donor" sheep, and transplanted the result, now carrying DNA only from the donor, into a surrogate ewe. But that technique, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, just kind of sucks at cloning other species. What lots of people don't know is that cloning is very difficult among certain species of animals. Cats: easy; dogs: hard; mice: easy; rats: hard; humans and other primates: very hard.