Legal, ethical limits to bioengineering debated

It is a truism that "politics makes strange bedfellows," but late Tuesday afternoon (March 20), in the Ames Courtroom of Harvard Law School's (HLS) Austin Hall, bioethics made two sets of philosophical bedfellows as strange as any Washington has seen.

The panelists for a discussion titled "Re-engineering Human Biology: What Should Be the Legal and Ethical Limits?" were Ronald M. Dworkin, Leon R. Kass, Richard A. Posner, and Michael Sandel. Based on the bodies of their past work, Dworkin and Sandel, "liberals" by most standards, and Kass and Posner, generally seen as staunch conservatives, would have been expected to pair off together.

full story »