Seeking to Balance Values of Science and Humanity
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081101THE BIOETHICIST
Seeking to Balance Values of Science and Humanity
By PAM BELLUCK
The Associated Press
Dr. Leon R. Kass of the University of Chicago was chosen by
President Bush to head a bioethics council.
A Closer Look: Leon Richard Kass (August 11, 2001)
The Bioethicist: A Philosopher Fully at Ease in Uncertainty
(August 10, 2001)
HICAGO, Aug. 10 — As one might expect, Dr. Leon Richard Kass, the
University of Chicago professor who will head President Bush's
council on bioethics, has written on subjects like cloning,
physician-assisted suicide and in-vitro fertilization.
But Dr. Kass has also written a book about eating customs and table
manners. And along with his wife, Amy Apfel Kass, a humanities
professor, he teaches a class on marriage and courtship, which
champions traditional virtues like patience and fidelity and draws
on examples from Jane Austen and Shakespeare's "As You Like It."
To Dr. Kass, 62, these subjects are simply pieces of an intellectual
whole.
"This is all part of anthropology in the ancient sense," he said.
"What does it mean to be a human being? A relation between what is
given to us naturally and what we make of ourselves culturally."
"We find ourselves in the present world with a kind of science that
is very, very powerful in understanding how things work, but is
absolutely silent on what they mean," he continued. "On the other
side we have a heritage which has been an attempt to express the
nature of our humanity. The goal is to try to see how we can
integrate the two."
That relationship, Dr. Kass said, is what drives his work and will
undoubtedly inform his approach as head of a body that will consider
bioethical issues, including research on stem cells taken from human
embryos, and advise the president on them.
"He approaches this as somebody who has thought a long time about
how you preserve and enhance human character, about how people today
value human life," said Dr. James Q. Wilson, an emeritus professor
of management and public policy at the University of California at
Los Angeles.
In 1998, Dr. Wilson was co-author of a book about human cloning with
Dr. Kass, in which Dr. Kass was adamantly against cloning and Dr.
Wilson was open to it under certain circumstances. Now, Dr. Wilson
said, his views are closer to Dr. Kass's.
Critics of Dr. Kass's views call him a neoconservative thinker,
citing his opposition to cloning and in- vitro fertilization. But
critics and admirers alike describe him as thoughtful and dignified,
an elegant writer interested in different perspectives on intricate
ethical issues.
"I think it's fair to say he is the neoconservative's favorite
bioethicist," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for
Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Caplan said that in opinion and manner, "if you were trying to
pick two people who were more different, you probably couldn't find
a bigger contrast than between me and him."
"I think Leon is a person who has been engaged by modernity but is
wrestling to try and cope with modernity," Dr. Caplan said.
But he added, "I think Leon Kass is one of the smartest, most
gentlemanly scholars in the field. I think he has impeccable
integrity, and I think he struggles hard to be fair."
Dr. Kass rejects being labeled, saying he considers himself "a
thoughtfully serious human being who's trying to contribute to a
more decent and more dignified world."
He would not discuss his own views on stem cells, but praised the
president for "the moral seriousness and principled character of his
decision." He would also not discuss whether he influenced Mr.
Bush's decision, saying only that he met with the president about a
month ago.
"I regard it as a deeply vexing and serious moral question," Dr.
Kass said.
Dr. Wilson said that the last time he spoke to Dr. Kass about stem
cells, about 18 months ago, "I never got the impression from him
that he had formulated a clear, simple position."
"He was turning it over in his mind and trying to get the sense of
when stem cell research could be useful," Dr. Wilson said.
Dr. Kass was born in Chicago and earned bachelor's and medical
degrees from the University of Chicago, before getting a doctorate
in biochemistry from Harvard. He began his career doing research in
molecular biology at the National Institutes of Health.
But he said that in the mid-1970's, around the time the first frog
was cloned, he began to change his focus.
"It dawned on me that there were large moral questions touching on
human nature and human dignity that were being raised by these
powerful and largely welcome developments in medical sciences," Dr.
Kass said. "It seemed to me that the real challenge of our society
was to find a way to reap the benefits of new biology without
sliding down the road to Brave New World and human degradation."
The University of Chicago is known for its emphasis on the classics
of Western thought, and Dr. Kass, who teaches in the university's
Committee on Social Thought, is versed in Aristotle, Plato and other
classicists. He said that he had also "spent a lot of time on
Rousseau and Darwin and Descartes and Bacon" and that "in my old age
I have taken an interest in the Hebrew Bible."
While the details of the bioethics council's membership and
responsibilities are still up in the air, Dr. Kass said he did not
necessarily consider its mission to be to form a consensus.
"If you aim at consensus you can only do so by stacking the panel
with people who have reached a foregone conclusion," he said, or by
reaching agreement "only at the lowest common denominator."