>Go read Nigel Cameron’s Choosing Tomorrow, today!
(I can’t resist red buttons marked “push” or puns.)
I’ve been writing a piece on “Public Health Ethics,” part of which I dredged up for my comment on this remark of Dr. Cameron’s,
“Bioethics” is an optical illusion. Which is not to say that we don’t need IRBs and clinical ethicists to titrate the rights of human subjects and patients in our universities and hospitals. But on the larger stage it’s broke, not least since you can say “autonomy” as often as you like and still not begin to address the vast issues of policy that beckon on the cusp of this still-new millennium. And at the end of the day autonomy and policy lie on opposite ends of a continuum.
(I love the analogy, “titrate the rights” – that’s classic bioethics-speak!)(for those who don’t remember Biology class – that was when we had two dispensers of liquids, acid and base, and we put a few drops of one and then a few drops of another, until the stuff in our beaker was neither pink nor blue, but purple or – better for the analogy – clear.)
LifeEthics 
>Not sure what im comin in on, but my experience of Dr. Cameron has been that he refuses to step into the choppy waters, he so far has refused to call for a ban on non male-female conception. I am not sure, at this point, whteher he is for or against allowing genetic engineering to happen.Has your experience been different?
Posted by John Howard | January 5, 2007, 5:51 am>I'm fairly sure that Dr. Cameron doesn't have the power to call for the banning of anything. I do believe that he feels that genetic engineering is immoral. For that reason, he has worked to build coalitions of people who share this viewpoint, although they might not have the same Christian or even pro-life background, and to influence US and UN policy makers in opposition to very loud voices calling for cloning, fetal and embryonic manipulations on the genetic level and the radical transhumanism that views the human body as obsolete.You really should go on over to his blog and ask him your questions!
Posted by LifeEthics.org | January 5, 2007, 8:33 am