This blog has been a Kass free zone for an entire week. That's just not acceptable. And yet, weary into death of his leaden prose, I feel a distinct lack of enthusiasm for pitching in and shoveling.

What to do? Sigh. Time for more outsourcing, I suppose.

Filched from the pages of Neuroethics and Law Blog, we have this review of Dr. Michael Gazzaniga's new book. A paragraph or two hit me where I live.

In December 2001, Dr. Gazzaniga was invited to join the bioethics council by Dr. Leon Kass, its current chairman. "I said, 'I don't know anything about bioethics,' " Dr. Gazzaniga recalled. Dr. Kass assured him that the council wasn't supposed to be a group of bioethicists, and Dr. Gazzaniga agreed to join.

The council immediately took up the debate on stem cell research. Dr. Gazzaniga supports the cloning of cells to produce embryos that can be used to extract stem cells. Others on the council felt very differently...

Dr. Gazzaniga is quick to point out that his differences with other council members were strictly intellectual. "There's no one I don't respect on the committee. They're all smart people," he said. "I heatedly disagree with some of them, but they're not lunatics."

Nevertheless, he did not shy from argument. At one meeting in 2002, Dr. Kass described his sense of awe at watching cells divide.

I'm actually familiar with the passage in question. Dr. Kass is a firm believer in the "Waste not, want not." school of wordsmithing. He has elevated prose recycling to an art. Or perhaps he just lacks originality. Could go either way.

"I countered him with, 'You ever see a tumor cell divide?' " Dr. Gazzaniga said. "It's also a pretty miraculous event, but all it does is fill you up with rage. You can look at it in two different ways."

Can one surf the tide of awe by watching "lesser" creatures fission? Absent the binding cords of sympathy, perhaps a euglena doesn't pack the same emotional punch as a human cell. I wonder.

Dr. Gazzaniga argues that it is meaningless to call a fertilized egg a potential human being. "There's potential for 30 homes in a Home Depot, but if the Home Depot burns down, the headline isn't '30 Homes Burn Down.' It's 'Home Depot Burns Down,' " Dr. Gazzaniga said.

According to the latest polls, almost two thirds of the country incline toward this viewpoint.

My other outsourcing today comes from The Common Ills, regarding the President's Bioethics Council...

Council member Janet Rowley, a professor of medicine, molecular genetics, cell biology, and human genetics at the University of Chicago Medical School, says she had concerns that staff members weren't adequately conveying the dissenting views in their published reports. "On occasion when these discrepancies were brought to their attention, they were more or less ignored."

Whattaya know. I had forgotten that Blackburn wasn't the only troublemaker.

Rowley, who remains on the council, says the panel has become less diverse since the new appointments...Rowley says Kass has discontinued the process of taking votes on issues and "runs this like a graduate seminar," she says. "You don't get council members who are expressing points of view that are at variance with the President's point of view."

Interesting, eh? It's an excerpt from an article in, ahem, The Progressive. Good to see some common interests across the aisle. Sadly, the article isn't available on line. Tell you what though. If I get so much as one comment expressing interest, I'll toddle off to the bookstore and buy The Progressive on dead tree. I will then transcribe, BY HAND, any interesting bits therein. So what do you say?

"Please God, no!" will not be considered a valid response.

Crickets chirping...