National Academies Presidents Recommend New Bioethics Commission Citing White Paper Co-Led by Prof. Susan Wolf

The presidents of the National Academies of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine have urged the Biden-Harris administration to create a new presidential bioethics commission. Their letter to Dr. Alondra Nelson, Interim Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), is based on a white paper authored by a working group and led by Susan M. Wolf, Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, and R. Alta Charo, Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Authors included members of three past bioethics commissions. They wrote, “For nearly half a century, federal commissions have advanced public dialogue and government policy on difficult ethical issues raised by emerging technologies, biomedical research, and health care. Yet since 2017, the U.S. has not had a bioethics commission to address such issues, or the increasingly complex questions raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, health inequities, genetic editing of living beings, artificial intelligence, and the accelerating climate crisis…. The current administration should follow the example of nearly every administration in the last 25 years and appoint a presidential bioethics commission.”