Not surprisingly, his selection as head of a national panel that will guide the government's oversight of stem-cell research is a source of anxiety among those who support the work. “He is a thoughtful physician who has been interested in bioethics for thirty years; I like him and respect him,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the center for bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “But he holds deeply conservative views about stem-cell research. Twenty years ago, he argued against the use of in vitro fertilization—he felt it was unnatural to make kids in dishes. He argues against cloning, stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning research on much the same grounds.”
Kass received his BS degree in biology and his medical degree from the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. He earned a PhD in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1967. He advises numerous ethical groups and is a founding fellow of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank outside New York City. He has published numerous articles on bioethics, social thought, science and human affairs, including such titles as “What Price the Perfect Baby?” and “Babies by Means of In Vitro Fertilization: Unethical Experiments on the Unborn?” He is outspoken in his opposition to human cloning, and wrote: “Even if human cloning is rarely undertaken, a society in which it is tolerated is no longer the same society—any more than is a society that permits incest or cannibalism or slavery on even a small scale. It is a society that has forgotten how to shudder, that rationalizes away the abominable.”
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