Dr. Edmund Pellegrino will be nominated to be a new member – and the Chair – of the President’s Council on Bioethics, according to this Personnel Announcement from the White House. He will succeed Dr. Leon Kass. 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, since this chair of the PCB has published more than 500 articles in the field and participated in more than 20 books, 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. They say as much – see for example the description of his role as Fellow at the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity here.

A conservative choice, yes, but a solid scholar of bioethics whose entire career has revolved around the virtues and character of physicians. – GM
[thanks Art Caplan and Tony Mazzaschi]