Leon Kass is leaving the President's Council on Bioethics. No word yet as to why. I certainly hope it's not for reasons of ill health. I want him to have an artificially prolonged and strappingly healthy life. Poetic justice would then demand that he clearly recognize just what a pompous horse's ass he's been. After which there should be an amusing yet sordid sex scandal. Here's hoping, anyway.

His replacement will be Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, and Bioethics Blog has many good things to say about him.

Pellegrino is one of the most respected, best published, and most accomplished scholars who has ever worked in bioethics. It is possible to gush about the White House's decision - a rare opportunity these days - in part because Pellegrino is a good, honest and kind person, but also because Pellegrino is not afraid to engage his academic peers and will not operate like a cheerleader for the administration, nor will he treat the Council like an oversized ethics seminar for neoconservatives.

So, for example, I do not expect to hear that the American Enterprise Institute is going to be selling the products of the deliberations by the Council in the future.

The sun will never rise on a day where Edmund Pellegrino lobbies Congress as a "private Citizen" for a "second term bioethics agenda," or writes Op Eds defending Presidential stem cell policy while sitting as Chair during a Presidential election year.

Pellegrino's views on a number of issues are well known...and while many of them are not my own views, I for one am happy to have those views expressed as the honest result of a well thought-out argument based on his years of peer-reviewed scholarship on clinical ethics.

Pellegrino's affiliations with groups of conservatives are of no concern to me because he is, again, no one's stooge.

A conservative choice, yes, but a solid scholar of bioethics whose entire career has revolved around the virtues and character of physicians.

Well, that's all very encouraging. Here's his CV...

Edmund Pellegrino, MD is the Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Medical Ethics at the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Georgetown University Medical Center. He was the John Carroll Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics and the former director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, the Center for the Advanced Study of Ethics at Georgetown University, and the Center for Clinical Bioethics.

He received his BS degree from St. John's University and his MD from New York University. He served residencies in medicine at Bellevue, Goldwater Memorial, and Homer Folks Tuberculosis Hospitals, following which he was a research fellow in renal medicine and physiology at New York University.

During Dr. Pellegrino's 50+ years in medicine and university administration, he has been departmental chairman, dean, vice chancellor, and president.

Dr. Pellegrino is the author of over 550 published items in medical science, philosophy, and ethics and a member of numerous editorial boards. He is the author or co-author of nineteen books, and the founding editor of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.

Dr. Pellegrino is a Master of the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and recipient of forty-seven honorary degrees in addition to other honors and awards including the Benjamin Rush Award from the American Medical Association, the Abraham Flexner Award of the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Laetare Award of the University of Notre Dame, and the Beecher Award for Life Achievement in Bioethics from The Hastings Center.

Dr. Pellegrino's research interests include the history and philosophy of medicine, professional ethics, and the physician-patient relationship.

Art Caplan, a quite sensible fellow (and a bioethicist!), had this to add...

Ed is a conservative and cautious thinker but he is a man of absolute integrity, grace and wisdom. The Council will benefit from his leadership enormously.

Well, it could certainly be worse. He sounds like a great man. Still, Ron Bailey at Reason isn't entirely thrilled...

...he participated in a press conference...in 1999 opposing all human embryonic stem cell research. At the press conference, Pellegrino urged that a congressional ban "should be extended permanently to include privately supported as well as federally supported research involving the production and destruction of living human embryos."

Lieber Gott.

But at least he has integrity. Funny thing about integrity. It's often compared, and rightly I think, to an inflated balloon. The slightest puncture, and all your hard-won helium honor just rushes right out, leaving you holding a limp, shredded, utterly useless bladder. Just try getting it to float.

There's an inevitable sadness to this news. I shall miss having Leon Kass to kick around. Perhaps others will too. But let's not borrow trouble from tomorrow when today has so much to go around. Perhaps we haven't heard the last of him. Timeless pompous assness follows...

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive...

Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal...

This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

Hey Leon?

Bite me.