Faculty Bibliography

Just a year ago there was a burgeoning literature in the popular press bemoaning the slow pace of research in gene therapy. A lengthy article in The New York Times Magazine profiled the problems faced by the parents who could not get their little boy, who was severely disabled by Canavan's disease, enrolled in a gene-therapy experiment. The key question raised in the article was: Why is the pace of gene therapy so slow? This is the same magazine that a year later finds itself wondering how the pace of gene therapy could be permitted to be so fast

Tremendous controversy has surrounded efforts to undertake research on totipotent human stem cells. To date public policy in the United States has attempted to skirt the ethical and social questions raised by this research. Annas et al. argue that research using human embryos as a source of totipotent stem cells can secure broad public support if there is an open and public discussion about the ethical justification for undertaking such research and the assurance of adequate federal regulation and oversight.

This is not a sentiment that people express about their particular doctor. Most people actually like their personal doctor. But, in the abstract, when Americans are making up their list of who it is out there who has grown insufferably enormous for their collective britches - doctors rank right up there

I HEAR IT a lot - people are always grabbing me at cocktail parties or water coolers in order to complain, "I wish doctors were not so arrogant." This is not a sentiment that people express about their particular doctor. Most people actually like their personal doctor. But, in the abstract, when Americans are making up their list of who it is out there who has grown unsufferably enormous for their collective britches - doctors rank right up there

Pluripotent human stem cell research may offer new treatments for hundreds of diseases, but opponents of this research argue that such therapy comes attached to a Faustian bargain: cures at the cost of the destruction of many frozen embryos. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), government officials, and many scholars of bioethics, including, in these pages, John Robertson, have not offered an adequate response to ethical objections to stem cell research. Instead of examining the ethical issues involved in sacrificing human embryos for the goal of curing fatal and disabling diseases, they seek to either dismiss the moral concerns of those with objections or to find an "accomodation" with those opposed to stem cell research. An ethical argument can be made that it is justifiable to modify or destroy certain human embryos in the pursuit of cures for dread and lethal diseases. Until this argument is made, the case for stem cell research will rest on political foundations rather than on the ethical foundations that the funding of stem cell research requires.