Janet Davison Rowley
79 | Professor of medicine, human genetics, molecular genetics and cell biology, University of Chicago; Member, President's Council on Bioethics

June 07, 2004
By Sarah A. Klein

Janet Davison Rowley knew when she accepted President George W. Bush's invitation to join an 18-member advisory panel on biomedical ethics in 2001 that she might run into trouble.

After decades as a cancer and genetics researcher, she disagreed with the president's conservative views on stem-cell research and cell cloning.

Tough cell: Janet Davison Rowley likes to bicycle to her laboratory at the University of Chicago. Photo: John R. Boehm

Indeed, she balked when the panel's report early this year, "Monitoring Stem Cell Research," supported Mr. Bush's view that adult stem cells are an adequate substitute for the embryonic stem cells he banned from research use in August 2001. Studies that cast doubt on the research value of adult stem cells are downplayed or are missing from the report, she says.

And she believes "Beyond Therapy," an October council report on the use of biotechnology to enhance lifestyles, rather than cure illness, plays on the public's fears of genetic technology, raising the specter of "designer" babies.

Dr. Rowley and Elizabeth Blackburn, a San Francisco biologist who left the council in April, outlined their concerns in a letter published in the April issue of San Francisco-based scientific journal PLoS Biology, pointedly titled "Reason as Our Guide."

"The public is done a disservice when science is presented incompletely; myths are then perpetuated," the duo wrote.