In late September 2001, I was asked to serve on the President's Council on Bioethics. My initial instinct was not to accept, because I was concerned that the Bush Administration would not be interested in considering fully the potential of certain controversial advances in basic biomedical research. Indeed, the administration was already on record as opposing federal funding for somatic-cell nuclear transplantation and therapeutic cloning. (Therapeutic cloning involves making early-stage preimplantation embryos for use as sources of stem cells, whereas reproductive cloning is the creation of cloned babies through the transfer of cloned embryos into a woman's uterus.) Two factors, . . .