The mob craving to bring coercive law into every realm of human behaviour has long troubled ethicists.
The odds of producing a healthy child through reproductive cloning are tiny.It is here that an overseer similar to Britain's HFEA, a panel of scientists and ethicists accountable to parliament, would be useful.
Two additional biotechnology advisory commissions one on health and the other on the environment, stuffed with laymen and ethicists as well as scientists will soon augment the existing paraphernalia of regulation.
Last, and most important, more collaboration is required between engineers, ethicists, lawyers and policymakers, all of whom would draw up very different types of rules if they were left to their own devices.
Besides, whatever the ethicists say, the overall impact of a course may teach a different lesson.
In America a long terminal illness can leave people deep in debt: that makes ethicists fear that euthanasia might be requested for financial reasons.
After months of fraught deliberation involving the world's leading virologists, journal editors, security experts, ethicists and policymakers, the Americans reversed their stance on April 20th (see article).
Some ethicists, such as David Velleman at New York University, argue that giving the very ill the choice to commit suicide easily and legally harms all ill people by taking from them the option of continuing to live by default.We expect human beings to provide reasons for their choices.
But there may be a moral dilemma for ethicists if trials whose control arms put volunteers at risk turn out to be the quicker way to an answer.
Many ethicists, as they are called, are paid consultants to the growing biomedical industry, and not a few scientists in this area are religious believers with a doctrinal agenda.
Ethicists have a name for the confused idea that moral conclusions can be deduced from scientific evidence: they call it the "naturalistic fallacy", and it cuts two ways.
