Boston College Front Row

The U.S. Constitution is silent on bioethical issues such as stem cell research and cloning, according to Diana Schaub, chair of the Department of Political Science at Loyola College of Maryland. This fact "should be taken as an invitation to practice self-government as the founding fathers intended," she asserts, before describing the efforts of the executive and legislative branches of government to cope with the legal and ethical questions that new medical technologies force us to confront. Schaub is author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).