The President's Council on Bioethics: My Take on Some of Its Deliberations

When Dr. Leon Kass accepted the appointment as chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, he recognized that President Bush and most members of Congress had probably already formed their views on the subject of cloning and other issues that might come before the Council. But he hoped that the Council might produce a series of documents that would deepen a continuing national conversation on bioethics, whatever immediate policy decisions were forthcoming. To wrestle with such questions as cloning, stem cell research, and the genetic enhancement of human beings, the Council would need to stand back from the immediate tactical struggle over federal policies and reflect on the human condition—the whence and whither of being human, the mysteries of mating and parenting, and the human drives that underlie scientific inquiry.

To that end, Kass asked the Council at its first meeting to begin its deliberations on cloning with a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Birthmark," a choice which, on the instant, aroused the worst fears of some critics as to what this Council might be up to. Hawthorne tells the story of a scientist who loves his wife but kills her in the utopian attempt to remove her single imperfection, a birthmark on her left cheek. This flaw is nothing more than a superficial blemish, not a lethal tumor, but her scientist husband determines zealously to remove it, no matter what the cost. The story ends bleakly. The dying woman tells her husband, after she has taken the aggressive toxic "cure" that her husband has prepared for her: "My poor Aylmer . . . you have rejected the best that earth could offer. Aylmer, dearest, Aylmer, I am dying."

Kass asked me as a Council member to open the discussion of the Hawthorne story. I could imagine the newspaper reports following: the President's Council opens with a 19th-century horror story about a mad scientist. In order to cover my flanks and perhaps those of the Council, I announced that I did not intend to extract from the story inferences for any of the policy issues that might come before the Council. The contributions of literary art to public life are largely indirect: novelists don't bake bread or write legislation. However, if attentively read and discussed, the Hawthorne story might help Council members recognize the way in which all major undertakings, those of the Council included, sooner or later force reflection on the human condition, a condition which we know first and foremost not as experts, but as participants in daily life. Thus the Council's deliberations would begin not with the great public projects associated with biotechnology, but with a tale which, though strange, nevertheless sheds light on everyday life.

"The Birthmark" is a bizarre story, yet it exposes two powerful human drives: the yearning for perfection, and the struggle with the unelected marks and defects that go with our birth. We cope with these drives in daily life chiefly in the setting of the passions, particularly the passions of self-love, intimate sexual love, and parental love. In all three arenas, we struggle both with the yearning for perfection and with the marks of a condition largely given and received rather than self-created or chosen. The morning mirror supplies self-love with the daily job of both enhancing and yet accepting what's there. Hawthorne's story explores these drives in the setting of marital love. Although I have had many decades of experience in the complexities of marital love, I wanted to spare the Council my comments on that subject and to angle my way back into the Hawthorne story by reflecting on parenting, surely a role germane to the subject of cloning.

Parenting entails a double passion and loyalty both to the being and to the well-being of the child. Neither loyalty is complete alone. On the one hand, parents need to accept the child as he is—as Frost said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in." On the other hand, parents must...