Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Obama Bioethics Commission report on synthetic biology
In December, President Obama's Bioethics Commission issued a report on synthetic biology -- the engineering of new forms of life. I have not heard much news coverage about it, and I haven't read the report. For my own research purposes, I'm interested in how the concept of "human dignity" is being used (or not) in public policy discussions. I ran a "find" search for "dignity" in the report, and the word does not appear. I know that President Bush's Commission was criticized for relying on "dignity" to do too much heavy lifting in its analysis (a criticism with which I disagree), so I wonder if this is a deliberate decision by the new Commission to chart a new course. Again, though, I haven't read the (192-page) report, and I know the Commission has some good folks on it (e.g., Daniel Sulmasy). Can anyone comment on the report or steer me in the direction of some good commentary?
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/02/obama-bioethics-commission-report-on-synthetic-biology.html
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Can we create life? I mean, we can certainly create something that can respond to stimuli and reproduce itself. There are machines that do that.
And, I guess we create life in some sense when we reproduce.
I just wonder if there isn't a vocabularly problem here. Like when people say they were "dead" for so many minutes. They weren't dead; they're hearts stopped beating. That doesn't necessarily kill you, at least not in a spiritual sense.