Kerry Criticizes Bush for Bioethics Panel

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Kerry Criticizes Bush for Bioethics Panel

INDIANAPOLIS - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) criticized President Bush (news - web sites)'s replacement of two dissenting members of a bioethics panel that advises him on such issues as cloning and stem cell research.

"A scientific panel ought to be chosen on the basis of science and on the basis of reputation, not politics," the Massachusetts senator told reporters Saturday during a refueling stop on a flight from Oakland, Calif., to New York.

"I think that is the wrong thing to do when a country is searching for its appropriate scientific policy. We deserve to have people whose reputations and abilities are not tarnished and are not focused by politics or religion."

Elizabeth Blackburn, a cell biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and former president of the American Society for Cell Biology, and William F. May, a medical ethicist and retired professor at Southern Methodist University, were dismissed Friday from the President's Council on Bioethics.

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Kerry Criticizes Bush for Bioethics Panel