After a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

If you walk into the office of a scientist, chances are you'll see a white board hanging on the wall covered in scrawls. A molecular biologist's white board might be covered by hideous tangles of protein chains. A geophysicist might doodle India crashing into southern Asia.

The scribbles of Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, are more metaphysical. Arrows travel from a pair of eyes into a cartoon brain, finally ending at the word "Apple." Another picture bluntly sums up the modern debate over free will, with a stick figure's head labeled "Brain," and two bubbles point toward it - one labeled "Judge" and the other "Neu" - short for neuroscience. Floating uncertainly off to one side is a third bubble that asks, "Mind?"

Big questions are Dr. Gazzaniga's stock in trade. In the 1980's he helped found cognitive neuroscience, a discipline designed to find out how the mind emerges from the brain. Today, at age 65, he continues to oversee a busy lab where brain scans offer clues to how we unconsciously create theories to explain the outer world and our inner lives.

Vatican officials on Thursday decried what they called a "religion of health" in affluent societies and held out Roman Catholic Pope John Paul's stoic suffering as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine must cure all.

"While millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires," said Rev. Maurizio Faggioni, a theologian and morality expert on the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life.

The $3-billion measure puts California in the forefront of an ongoing national debate.

An initiative that would have state taxpayers underwrite $3 billion worth of research into using embryonic stem cells to develop cures for Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases qualified for the Nov. 2 ballot Thursday, propelling California to the forefront of a national battle at the intersection of science and morality.

Scientific knowledge has a vital, if limited, role to play in shaping our moral values and helping us to frame wiser judgments. Ethical values are natural and open to examination in the light of evidence and reason.

Can science and reason be used to develop ethical judgments? Many theists claim that without religious foundations, "anything goes," and social chaos will ensue. Scientific naturalists believe that secular societies already have developed responsible ethical norms and that science and reason have helped us to solve moral dilemmas. How and in what sense this occurs are vital issues that need to be discussed in contemporary society, for this may very well be the hottest issue of the twenty-first century.

Dramatic breakthroughs on the frontiers of science provide new powers to humans, but they also pose perplexing moral quandaries. Should we use or limit these scientific discoveries, such as the cloning of humans? Much of this research is banned in the United States and restricted in Canada. Should scientists be permitted to reproduce humans by cloning (as we now do with animals), or is this too dangerous? Should we be allowed to make "designer babies?" Many theologians and politicians are horrified by this; many scientists and philosophers believe that it is not only inevitable but justifiable under certain conditions. There were loud cries against in vitro fertilization, or artificial insemination, only two generations ago, but the procedure proved to be a great boon to childless couples. Many religious conservatives are opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on fetal tissues, because they think that "ensoulment" occurs with the first division of cells. Scientists are appalled by this censorship of scientific research, since the research has the potential to cure many illnesses; they believe those who oppose it have ignored the welfare of countless numbers of human beings. There are other equally controversial issues on the frontiers of science: Organ transplants-who should get them and why? Is the use of animal organs to supply parts for human bodies wrong? Is transhumanism reforming what it means to be human? How shall we control AIDS-is it wicked to use condoms, as some religious conservatives think, or should this be a high priority in Africa and elsewhere? Does global warming mean we need a radical transformation of industry in affluent countries? Is homosexuality genetic, and if so, is the denial of same-sex marriage morally wrong? How can we decide such questions? What criteria may we draw upon?

The debate over embryonic stem-cell research, which occupied President Bush during his early days in the White House, is re-emerging as an election issue as advocates for patients, including Nancy Reagan, press the president to loosen the limits on federal financing for the science.

Mrs. Reagan, whose husband, former President Ronald Reagan, suffers from Alzheimer's disease, has made her support for the research known but has never spoken publicly about it. She is expected to do so in Beverly Hills on Saturday night at a star-studded fund-raiser sponsored by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Embryonic stem-cell studies are controversial because they involve the destruction of human embryos; Mr. Bush's policy, announced in August 2001, restricts the research in a way that does not permit embryos to be destroyed with taxpayer dollars. But the diabetes foundation says the policy is impeding science. It has been sending patients to lobby lawmakers in Washington and has found some unlikely allies in Congress.

Last month the first cloned human embryo was produced by South Korean scientists who said they would continue their research despite the queasiness of critics.

This month a biologist at Harvard announced that he had developed 17 new lines of human stem cells, using private money to bypass a government moratorium on such research.

And as if in demonstration of the roiling passions stirred up by such probings of nascent human life, a renowned biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, was dismissed from the President's Council on Bioethics. She then accused the administration of stacking the council with opponents of this research.

In the face of all this, what purpose can possibly be served by a 628-page publication of the bioethics council, an anthology called "Being Human," with its accounts of Peter Pan's short memory, Richard P. Feynman's approach to problem solving and a baseball batter's lightning-fast analysis of a pitch? Do "Silas Marner" and Walt Whitman and Achilles have anything to do with debates over the harvesting of microscopic human cells or the development of antidepressants?

Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D.

In late September 2001, I was asked to serve on the President’s Council on Bioethics. My initial instinct was not to accept, because I was concerned that the Bush Administration would not be interested in considering fully the potential of certain controversial advances in basic biomedical research. Indeed, the administration was already on record as opposing federal funding for somatic-cell nuclear transplantation and therapeutic cloning. (Therapeutic cloning involves making early-stage preimplantation embryos for use as sources of stem cells, whereas reproductive cloning is the creation of cloned babies through the transfer of cloned embryos into a woman’s uterus.) Two factors, however, tipped the balance in favor of accepting the appointment. First, as the country mourned after the tragedy of September11, 2001, I felt that I wanted to contribute something. Second, I received strong assurance from the council’s newly appointed chairman Leon Kass (and later from President George W. Bush himself) that the wisdom of a full range of experts was needed. I believed that, especially at this juncture in history, it was important to serve in this potentially critical way.

Unfortunately, my initial misgiving proved to be prescient. In a telephone call from the White House one Friday afternoon last month, I was told that my services were no longer needed. The only explanation I was offered was that “the White House has decided to make some changes in the bioethics council. “Persons who are versed in such matters have since suggested that the prearranged timing of the call was not a coincidence: this administration commonly takes controversial action on Friday afternoons, when the news is expected to fall into a weekend void.