Edmund Pellegrino to Replace Leon Kass as Chair of the President's Council on Bioethics
Dr. Edmund Pellegrino will be nominated to be a new member - and the Chair - of the President's Council on Bioethics, according to this Personnel Announcement from the White House. He will succeed Dr. Leon Kass.
Pellegrino is one of the most respected, best published, and most accomplished scholars who has ever worked in bioethics. It is possible to gush about the White House's decision - a rare opportunity these days - in part because Pellegrino is a good, honest and kind person, but also because Pellegrino is not afraid to engage his academic peers and will not operate like a cheerleader for the administration, nor will he treat the Council like an oversized ethics seminar for neoconservatives. So, for example, I do not expect to hear that the American Enterprise Institute is going to be selling the products of the deliberations by the Council in the future. The sun will never rise on a day where Edmund Pellegrino lobbies Congress as a "private Citizen" for a "second term bioethics agenda," or writes Op Eds defending Presidential stem cell policy while sitting as Chair during a Presidential election year.
Pellegrino's views on a number of issues are well known, since this chair of the PCB has published more than 500 articles in the field and participated in more than 20 books, and while many of them are not my own views, I for one am happy to have those views expressed as the honest result of a well thought-out argument based on his years of peer-reviewed scholarship on clinical ethics. Pellegrino's affiliations with groups of conservatives are of no concern to me because he is, again, no one's stooge. They say as much - see for example the description of his role as Fellow at the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity here.
A conservative choice, yes, but a solid scholar of bioethics whose entire career has revolved around the virtues and character of physicians. - GM
[thanks Art Caplan and Tony Mazzaschi]
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Ed is a conservative and cautious thinker but he is a man of absolute integrity, grace and wisdom. The Council will benefit from his leadership enormously.
- by Art Caplan on Sep 8, 2005 at 3:42 AM | link
There is a really fun book from 1987 called Physicians Observed: A startling examination of the
men and women we trust with our lives. By David R. Slavitt. Ed Pelligrino is one of the featured physicians.
- by Andrea Kalfoglou on Sep 8, 2005 at 12:38 PM | link
Surely there was someone more Rove-like than Pellegrino available??
- by Kevin F. on Sep 8, 2005 at 11:53 PM | link
This should be interesting.
Dr. Pellegrino is on the staff of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, as well as the Georgetown Center.
- by Beverly on Sep 9, 2005 at 4:40 AM | link
I left this part off the other post:
http://www.cbhd.org/resources/biotech/pellegrino_2004-11-30.htm
The ethical questions are related to the means by which these new treatments are developed and applied. Genetic manipulations, cybernetics, nanotechnology, and psychopharmacology are in themselves not intrinsically good nor bad morally. Procedures, however, derived from the destruction of human embryos, distortions and bypassing of normal reproductive processes, or cloning of human beings, etc., are not morally permissible no matter how useful they might be therapeutically.
- by Beverly on Sep 9, 2005 at 11:52 PM | link
They could hire a stump and be better off than the current situation
- by Katie Carlson on Sep 10, 2005 at 1:19 PM | link
Appointing someone who is a specialist in their field to a council position - this is not something i expected from the bush administration. i thought the current policy was to appoint dubya's buddies.
- by NiK0 on Sep 10, 2005 at 6:19 PM | link
This is great news...looking forward to seeing what will result from his appointment.
- by Jennifer on Sep 12, 2005 at 8:17 PM | link