The President’s Council on Bioethics is a 17-member panel appointed by President Bush in 2001 to replace the former National Bioethics Advisory Council. The new council includes physicians, lawyers, political scientists, a philosopher and a scientist. It advises the president on a range of bioethics questions.

LeRoy Walters is Senior Professor of Christian Ethics and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. He has taught at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics since its founding in 1971. Walters served as director of the institute from 1996-99 and has written, taught and lectured extensively on ethical issues in genetic research and gene therapy, stem cell […]

Tom Beauchamp is a professor of philosophy and a senior research scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Washington, D.C. In 1976, he joined the staff of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, where he wrote the bulk of The Belmont Report (1978), the first and still-definitive document […]

The Catholic Biblical Association is a leading organization of biblical scholars, numbering more than 1,200 around the world. The Rev. Joseph Jensen is executive secretary of the CBA, which was founded in 1936 and is based at Catholic University of America.

Hershel Shanks is the founder of the Biblical Archaeology Society, based in Washington, D.C., and editor of the society’s publication, the Biblical Archaeology Review. Shanks and the BAR are alternately praised and pilloried for efforts to “popularize” biblical archaeology. They were a driving force behind efforts to promote the so-called James ossuary in 2003.

Read a May 1, 2009, National Catholic Reporter story about a rally of human rights activists in Washington, D.C., to support a criminal inquiry.

Rachel Wegner is the president of Ethica, an adoption advocacy organization that works for ethical adoption practices internationally.

Trish Maskew teaches adoption law, policy and practice at American University Washington College of Law. She founded Ethica, an adoption advocacy organization that works for ethical adoption practices internationally. She wrote Our Own: Adopting and Parenting the Older Child.

Linda S. Spears is the vice president of the Child Welfare League of America. She has been a social worker, manager and agency head and is a former director of field support for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. An enrolled member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, she is expert on issues of Indian child […]