Pellegrino Faces Tough Task

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 11/3/05)

The announcement last month that Leon R. Kass was stepping down as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and would be succeeded by Dr. Edmund Pellegrino provoked some predictable sniping at Kass. Rick Weiss of The Washington Post summed up the case against the University of Chicago ethicist like this:

"Although widely respected for his intellect, Kass's history of opposition to some reproductive technologies and his general wariness of other biomedical trends … made him a thorn in the side of many researchers and liberal thinkers."

In fact, Kass appears to have done an excellent job and it is good news that he will remain on the bioethics council while quitting the chairmanship. The criticism reported by Weiss simply illustrates, in a politically charged context, why people who are not flat-earthers nevertheless worry about the ability of scientific "researchers and liberal thinkers" to practice self-restraint and self-regulation.

While numbering myself among the worriers, I should point out that I have no intention of pandering to ignorance and fear in order to whip up anti-science feeling. It's part of my faith as a religious believer that the exercise of scientific knowledge and technical skill is a human participation in the creative activity of God. For people who believe that, God's mandate in Genesis to "subdue" the earth (Gen 1:28) is the primordial charter of the scientific enterprise.

But this charter is not a blank check. Blind trust that unconstrained scientific "progress" will always make everything better for everybody is a relic of the 19th century. Naïve trust in science as a panacea has been overtaken by scientific horrors like scientists who placed themselves at the service of Hitler's racist madness, wonder drugs that crippled and killed, and state-of-the-art technology that blighted the landscape and befouled our air and water.

That is the not-so-distant past. As for the future, consider that, thanks to science and scientists, the possibility now exists that we will have full-blown "chimeras" in our midst one of these days.

A chimera, as biologists use the word, is an animal that at the cell or tissue level is partly one kind, partly another. Chimeras are different from hybrids like mules, in all of whose cells the DNA of two species is mixed. A chimera, by contrast, would be a bit of this and a bit of that — a mouse whose brain consisted entirely of human cells, let us say. Chimeras could be useful as sources of organs for transplants and subjects of various tests.

Is this some kind of joke? To underline the fact that it's not, Dr. Stuart A. Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, sought a patent a while back on what he called a "humanzee" — part human, part chimpanzee. The humanzee doesn't exist yet, but the point was that it could, and seeking a patent was a way to "alert the general public to the need for regulations and restrictions in this area," Newman wrote in Science & Theology News.

After some delay, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office turned down his application. Among the reasons cited, according to Newman, was the absence of guidance from Congress concerning "how 'human' an organism can be before it is not patentable by the 13th Amendment's prohibition of slavery."

Pellegrino comes to the chairmanship of the President's Council on Bioethics with a distinguished background as a Georgetown University bioethicist and former president of Catholic University. Like Kass before him, he has his work cut out.

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