WASHINGTON — The Biden administration should reinstate a presidential bioethics advisory commission to help inform and guide policy decisions that have bioethical implications, said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt and National Academy of Medicine President Victor J. Dzau in a recent letter to Alondra Nelson, interim director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The letter was delivered with an independent white paper underscoring the need for such a commission, authored by an ad hoc working group of experts in medicine, bioethics, and law that includes members of the past three presidential commissions for the study of bioethical issues.

“Over the past five decades, U.S. bioethics commissions under both Democratic and Republican administrations have helped guide the development of government policy affecting millions of U.S. citizens in important ways,” says the letter from McNutt and Dzau. “However, a presidential commission on bioethics has not been appointed since 2017. As a result, despite many current events and developments with critical bioethics implications, important government decisions are being made without such a commission to examine, review, and help inform U.S. policymaking.”

The accompanying white paper — written by a working group led by co-chairs Susan Wolf, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota, and Alta Charo, Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison — identifies existing and emerging topics for which a presidential bioethics commission could provide analysis, advice, and public consensus building, such as pandemic-related public health decisions, the use of potentially biased artificial intelligence and adaptive algorithms in health care research and clinical care, or bioethical issues raised by climate change.

For instance, “No prior bioethics commission has canvassed the ethical issues raised by research and interventions that can alter ecology …. Nor has any commission addressed the health and equity implications of heat waves and heat stress, changes in the distribution of vector-borne diseases, flooding and displacement, and increased ozone pollution, to mention just a few effects of climate change,” the white paper says.

“Such a commission can address the values conflicts underlying policy debates, promote public consensus, and inform decisions by regulatory and policymaking bodies that may not be authorized to consider broad ethical issues.”

The full text of the letter and the white paper are also available here.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

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