The membership of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was announced this week, and Summer Johnson, a blogger at the American Journal of Bioethics' blog, says she is "boggled" by the commission's composition. While the membership is highly qualified, she writes, the real issue is that it's unclear how the commission will fulfill the diverse obligations of its charter as the list of members "lacks creativity in terms of what a bioethics commission could have done," specifically exploring "revolutionary" scientific research.
However, among disciplines included on the panel are genetics – represented by Raju Kucherlapati from the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics – HIV/AIDS, and cancer.