synthetic biology

Ladies and gentlemen, if you can please take your seats, we’re going to get started. Commission members, if you’d please take your seats.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, if you would, please, take your seats, we’re ready to get started. While Diane is standing, I’d like to introduce her as your designated federal officer which makes this meeting legal.

 

Good morning, I’m Amy Gutmann, and I’m President of the University of Pennsylvania and the Chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Our Vice Chair, Jim Wagner, will introduce the first session.

 

I want to thank our panelists. We have had a terrific first day so far of presentations and questions. As someone once said, good questions outrank easy answers. Nobody tried to give us easy answers, and I thought all the questions from commission-members and public were really excellent and will help us a lot.

 

Let me invite Dr. Kaebnick and Dr. Buchanan to come to the table. We’re not going to take a break. We’re hardly going to breathe as we move into the fourth and final panel of the day. As they are getting in place, the fourth panel deals very specifically with ethical issues of synthetic biology.

 

Jim Wagner:

Let’s ask folks to take their seats. There’s quite a bit of chatter in the intermission, which is wonderful. Hugh, you want to come up, so I can have an opportunity to introduce you.

 

Amy Gutmann:

We will begin with the first principle of Democratic Deliberation and Dan.

 

Dan Sulmasy:

Thanks. I’ve been a fan of Democratic Deliberation and a proponent of its applicability to bioethics for some time, so it’s lucky for me that I got to work on a commission that is chaired by one of the leading lights in the field, Dr. Gutmann.

 

Amy Gutmann:

Good Morning, I’m Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania and I’m Chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. The President of Emory University joins me, Jim Wagner, who is the Vice Chair of the Commission, and all of the commissioners, save Raju, who may be on speakerphone. Raju, are you here? No, Raju isn’t. Let me just go around and ask each of the Commission members to introduce themselves, beginning with Nelson Michael.

 

Nelson Michael: