How, if at all, should we govern new developments in human biotechnology? In many cases, decisions will be made best by the individuals involved. In others, legislation and government action will be required to prevent genuinely serious abuses. Telling one type of case from the other is not always simple, and requires a lot of argument and give and take.

We have already seen the early skirmishes surrounding issues like human cloning, “fetal farming,” embryo-destructive research, and some forms of assisted reproduction. In some instances, laws have been passed. In others, the advocates of unrestricted choice have carried the day. That’s how we make decisions in a democracy.

But to some, this seems like no way to approach such momentous and difficult issues. Surely, they argue, a detached body of experts would do a better job, case by case. This, at any rate, is the argument for a new structure of regulation for biotechnology, an argument that has carried the day in Britain (and to some extent in Canada) and whose most prominent American exponent is Francis Fukuyama.

As Ron Bailey reports in Reason Magazine, Fukuyama has just produced a 400-page report calling for the creation of a new regulatory agency to make decisions about the appropriate uses of human biotechnology. The report emerged from the work of a study group convened by Fukuyama at Johns Hopkins University. Though I was a member of the group, I did not sign on to the report, since I disagreed with its conclusions.

Fukuyama believes that only a complex regulatory body can handle the difficult decisions to come—an agency like the Food and Drug Administration or (a closer analogy) Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (how’s that for an Orwellian name?). Others, like Bailey in his Reason article, seem to think that government control will only make things worse, and that individual choice could and should set the proper boundaries of the age of biotech. Still others, myself included, argue that turning things over to regulators would harm both the development of biotechnology and the protection of human life and dignity. When boundaries are needed, they should be set by answerable elected officials, not a body of bureaucrats certain to be captured by the very interests they regulate.

The crucial feature of the regulatory approach is that it closes off some key questions at the outset. If your job is to regulate embryo-destructive research, there can be no discussion of whether such research is ethically appropriate to begin with. This is what has happened in Britain, where an arcane regulatory regime holds endless public discussions and arguments about everything except the actually relevant ethical questions. That’s no way to treat a live controversy, where the question is not “how” but “if.” It is, however, an effective way to change the subject—which of course is what its advocates like best about it.