As you may have heard by now, President Obama has disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics. As usual, my buddy Joe says it better than I could:

To the electoral victor goes the electoral spoils, so Obama’s disbanding is neither surprising nor unprecedented. It is, however, lamentable, if for no other reason than that they will no longer be producing rich, nuanced works of philosophical reflection. Bioethics commissions have been around since the mid-1970s but under Leon Kass and later Edmund Pellegrino the council created a new literary genre of government documents: pythonic guides to policy.

Several members of the President’s Council on Bioethics have weighed in on the President’s Executive Order on Stem Cell Resarch.

Although members of the President’s Council on Bioethics have been divided on this question and some of our colleagues disagree with us, we think it may be useful and clarifying to set the president’s action in three ways into the context of work the council has done over the past seven years.