Faculty Bibliography

The House is not the only legislative body worrying about human cloning. More than 30 other nations, including Germany, France and Italy, have already outlawed all forms of human cloning. President Bush has made it clear that he wants to move toward outlawing all forms of human cloning as soon as he returns to Washington

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would outlaw not only human cloning but also any attempt to make embryos using cloning techniques. Tom Daschle, majority leader of the Senate, says that he is "uneasy" about cloning. And President Bush has made it clear that he approves of no human cloning of any kind for any purpose

The House has passed a bill that would outlaw not only human cloning, but also any attempt to make embryos using cloning techniques. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the Senate majority leader, says he is uneasy about cloning. And President Bush has made it clear that he approves of no human cloning of any kind for any purpose

We are carrying around, in the core recipe of humanity, clumps of genes that show that we have exactly the same arrays of genes governing key parts of our chemistry as bacteria. There is no other way to explain the jerryrigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development than by noting that they have been slowly assembled from instructions that were present in our jellyfish, dinosaur, woolly mammoth and primate ancestors. No one can look at how the book of life is written and not come away understanding that our core program is quite obviously the result of a series of slow changes built up over time from the programs that guided the development of earlier animals. There is no other possible explanation

Conceived as a solution to clinical dilemmas, and now required by organizations for hospital accreditation, ethics committees have been subject only to small-scale studies. The wide use of ethics committees and the diverse roles they have played compel study. In 1999 the University of Pennsylvania Ethics Committee Research Group (ECRG) completed the first national survey of the presence, composition, and activities of U.S. healthcare ethics committees (HECs). Ethics committees are relatively young, on average seven years in operation. Eighty-six percent of ethics committees report that they played a role in ongoing clinical decision making through clinical ethics consultation. All are engaged in developing institutional clinical policy. Although 4.5% of HECs write policy on managed care, 50% of HEC chairs feel inadequately prepared to address managed care. The power and activity of ethics committees parallels the composition of those committees and the relationship of members to their institutions. The role of ethics committees across the nation in making policies about clinical care is greater than was known, and ethics committees will likely continue to play an important role in the debate and resolution of clinical cases and clinical policies.