“I think modern science is a religion for many of its practitioners, by which I mean they have utter faith in the sufficiency of their concepts to give full account of life. But science cannot be a source of wisdom. By design it is morally neutral and indifferent to the pursuit of wisdom about human life……If modernity went wrong, it was in taking partial truths of science to be the whole truth about the world………..no purely biological account of man will ever be able to do justice to our lived experience as human beings.”—Dr. Leon Kass, Founding Chairman, President’s Council on Bioethics.“When the traditional ethic of the sanctity of human life is proven indefensible at both the beginning and end of life, a new ethic will replace it…….We will understand that even if the life of a human organism begins at conception, the life of a person—that is, at a minimum, a being with some level of self-awareness—does not begin so early.”—Dr. Peter Singer, Professor and Chair, Department of Bioethics, Princeton University.

These two points of view help to illustrate the difficultly of finding consensus in the scientific research and bioethics communities on the proper limits of science as it pushes us ever more rapidly and intensely into the debate on the nature of what is meant by being human. There are those like Singer and many others of a utilitarian persuasion who cannot seem to find any moral limits to this pursuit. And there are those like Kass, Charles Krauthammer, and others who are scientists by training, but who maintain a certain awe and reverence for the mysteries of life and the wisdom of the ages, however humanly limited they may be in their own wisdom about how it should be specifically applied to today’s scientific breakthroughs.

President Bush’s veto of the bill that would have overturned his executive order imposing limits on federal funding of stem cell research should not have been his first. I can think of a handful of others that should have preceded it, such as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, the atrocious agriculture subsidy appropriation of 2002 which is now helping to scuttle the Doha free trade talks, and the Medicare “reform” bill, to name a few. And there might even have been a better answer for the research funding limits he imposed or a different place to draw the moral line. But at least he is willing to draw the line somewhere and, if only in that respect, the veto was appropriate because the proposed law contained no meaningful limits.

We need to get beyond the notion of “if it can be done, it will be done” in the name of scientific “progress”, and, as Krauthammer suggests, get to a serious discussion of the real threat, which is “not so much the destruction of existing human embryos……the real threat to our humanity is the creation of new human life willfully for the sole purpose of making it the means to someone else’s end……The real Brave New World looming before us is the rise of the industry of human manufacture……..”.

Despite claims to the contrary, with the exception of the overwhelming opposition to human cloning, the polling on this issue is far from conclusive on a public consensus, so the President’s veto serves the purpose of sending us back to the drawing board. There has been some high quality work done by Dr. Kass and his colleagues, including specific legislative recommendations that have languished because of “embryo politics” from both the left and the right. We now have a President who is as sympathetic as we are ever likely to have to the concerns of human dignity we should all share, who has been presented with a meaningful body of work to move us forward in establishing wisdom in policy in an area that ranks with national security and public education as the most urgent of the early 21st century. We should get on with it.

“It is not clear to me what exactly the U. S. is trying to accomplish by not taking a stance in favor of an early cease fire.”—Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex-national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter.What will it take to convince world opinion leadership and the denial crowd in this country that Newt Gingrich is correct—this is World War III (or IV if you count the Cold War), it has many fronts, we have been in it for at least fifteen years, and it will be a very long one? Why is it that many, if not most, Americans and Europeans understand Islamic terrorism as the disconnected actions of disparate groups of religious fanatics? What is it about the liberal internationalist mind that cannot or will not connect the dots of the sequence of events over the past quarter century? Why is it always that the world’s first reaction, except in the U. S. and Britain, to the exercise of Israel’s sovereign right to self-defense is accusation of “disproportionate response” with immediate calls for cease fire? Why is it so difficult for some of us to empathize with the analogy of the establishment of a state-sponsored militia just across our border launching missiles into Chicago, or at least to the comparison with our Cuban missile crisis of 1962? And why do we continue to have patience or confidence in any reliance on the inept United Nations to monitor, much less enforce, any of its resolutions?

And yet the media laments that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s trips to the Middle East since the Hezbollah attacks on Israel aren’t really “peace missions”, contrasting them unfavorably to the shuttle diplomacy of previous administrations. UN Ambassador John Bolton has it right—Hezbollah is illegitimate, incapable of commitment, and has no authority to negotiate anything, not to mention that it has killed more Americans in the past 25 years than any other group with the exception of Al Qaeda on 9/11.

Let’s review: We’ve had Camp David, the Mitchell Plan, the Oslo Accord, Land for Peace, the Roadmap to Peace, etc., etc. All were failures. Isn’t it time to win the war? No victory, no peace.

In the wake of the second trial of Andrea Yates, in which she was acquitted by reason of insanity for the murder of her five children, The Houston Chronicle wants us to throw out what it calls the “restrictive, outdated” Texas law that requires juries to find a defendant guilty if she knew the difference between right and wrong in favor of one in which there must be a finding that she could “appreciate the wrongfulness” of her actions, a change unsuccessfully proposed during the last legislative session. I disagree, although I respect the decision of Ms. Yates’ peers in a very difficult set of facts in this case, which no doubt encompassed at least some culpability on the part of her negligent husband. She should never be out of confinement and, if that is the outcome, it makes little difference to me where she spends this confinement. The important issue here is the message we have sent—not guilty of murder, and the best solution for future cases that I have seen is one suggested by both Mike Gallagher and Mona Charen: Even the insane must take responsibility for their actions, so let’s establish in law a new choice of verdict—guilty, but insane. 

I have several thoughts about Warren Buffett’s decision to double the size of the Gates Foundation by contributing $30 billion of his fortune to it. First, it’s his money, and he can do with it as he pleases, although I wish he would support the repeal of the estate tax so that others with much less wherewithal to shelter their fortunes from this confiscation could have as much flexibility in their planning. Second, the resulting $60 billion foundation now becomes the 800-pound gorilla in the entire scheme of American philanthropic institutions and, while that might not be a bad idea in the short run, it gives one pause to consider what might be the result if future managements of this behemoth were to follow the paths of Ford, MacArthur, et al, in becoming champions of social engineering and other leftist impulses.My third observation is that, given my interest in education reform, I have some familiarity with the Gates Foundation’s initiatives in reforming the American high school, and I will be watching closely to what extent the additional Buffett resources will be used to help truly change the public education system. For it is here that the most dynamic results are possible, provided the funding is used not in incremental tweaking of the status quo, but in systemic transformation of the perverse incentive structure that is so deeply embedded in public education at every level. There is a model here, and it’s not one to emulate. The fortune of Walter Annenberg was largely unwisely invested in the 1990’s in attempting to replicate successful schools across the country, while not realizing that it is the system that must be overhauled and that it is competition that usually drives the replication of successful practices.