No Time for Bioethics at Presidential Bioethics Commission

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethics Issues says it is too busy to investigate EPA’s illegal human experimentation.

On May 14, 2012, we asked the EPA Inspector General to investigate illegal human experimentation at the EPA.

We also sent a copy of the EPA IG letter to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethics and requested that the Commission conduct an independent review of the matter. After all, the Commssion features this quote from President Obama on its home page:

As our nation invests in science and innovation and pursues advances in biomedical research and health care, it’s imperative that we do so in a responsible manner.

We received the following reply from the Commission (click to enlarge):

As you can see the Commission’s agenda is already filled with the burning issues of protecting the privacy of human genome gobbledygook, (nonexistent) anthrax vaccines for children, and the ethics of “neuroscience.” Moreover, it’s already assessed the standards for the conduct of human research.

It apparently has no time to look into a federal agency intentionally exposing already-sick people to a deadly pollutant — the sort of experiment that launched the field of bioethics in the first place following revelations during the Nuremberg trials.

Ethics, Schmethics. Dr. Amy Guttman, Chairman of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and the President of the University of Pennsylvania.

We will follow-up. Perhaps if Dr. Amy Gutmann, the chairman of the Commission as well as President of the University of Pennsylvania, actually reads and responds to the letter (instead of assigning it to some brainless bureaucrat), we will get a better response next time.

9 thoughts on “No Time for Bioethics at Presidential Bioethics Commission”

  1. When the Obama administration, with one day’s notice, dissolved the long-standing President’s Council on Bioethics, first chaired by Dr. Leon Kass and then Dr. Pellegrino, it also set up this new bioethics commission and redefined medical ethics (or is attempting to). The former commissions had provided ethical discussions at the core of the Hippocratic oath and consistent with the ethical principles guiding medical practice and human experimentation that arose from the 1946 Nuremberg trial. It had advised society, government and medical providers in light of the past distortions of medical ethos for political and economic interests that the world had witnessed during Nazi Germany.
    Obama’s commission has been given a new mandate to focus on helping to establish “ethically defensible” governmental policy. It also redefined medical ethics itself. No longer is medically ethical behavior unencumbered by poliltical or outside interests and devoted to the patient’s best interests foremost, along with the right to informed consent and freedom of choice and autonomy over their own bodies. Now, as seen with comparative effective research guiding the allocation of health care and costs under Obamacare, the value of life is based on one’s value to society and the state. Ethics, this “bioethics commission” wants us to believe, can be changed with political agendas.
    Thank you, Steve, for helping to call attention to what is going on in Washington. Hopefully, America will wake up before it’s too late.

  2. _Keep it simple_ ! Don’t make anyone wade through reams of evidence to get the story, make it the headline: The EPA is apparently conducting illegal human experimentation, and their (?) bioethics committee doesn’t want to know.

  3. That’s what concerns me most of all. I had hoped Big Brother would be marginally competent. It’s like they aren’t evn trying here. This entire charade has been barely sufficient to lunaticly transparent, and yet it is still impossible to get people riled up anywhere but here and WUWT.

  4. The “Associate Director”, in government-ese, has a primary responsibility of insulating the Director from issues that may prove controversial or politically embarrassing, allowing the figurehead ‘plausible deniability”. For this reason the associate director is selected for certain skills. It will be noted that the Associate Director is neither an MD not a PhD Philosopher with a specialization in Ethics, but rather a J.D. – a highly trained lawyer.

  5. Thx. I learned something. I thought the U.S. military didn’t use expanding bullets because of the Hague agreement of 1899. My research (to prove you wrong – sorry!) showed that we are not a signatory, but follow the rule only as a matter of policy. (!)

  6. The letter merely says that the EPA’s human research standards meet EPA standards. It says nothing at all about the possibility that these standards might have been breached. This letter is not a response, not at all.

    If this is what the EPA considers to be a clever evasion, it’s time to worry about the average IQ over there.

  7. As I wrote earlier, the US federal government has no integrity, no ethics. It is a criminal enterprise. I suggest you send this complaint to the human rights abuse council at the Hague. The US government has a long history of human rights abuses including doing radiation experiments on retarded children and the mass murder of men women and children at the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas. The people responsible for these acts, including their enablers, should be tried and executed.

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