What do you do when a majority of your bioethics panel recommends against what you want to do? Easy! Fire them.

The White House has dismissed the members of the President’s US Council on Bioethics just a few months before their mandate expires, indicating their services are no longer required by the President and that he is looking for a more “practical” advisory board.

The New York Times reported that Reid Cherlin, a White House press officer, told the paper that President Barack Obama saw them as “a philosophically leaning advisory group” designed by the previous Bush administration, and he wanted to appoint a new bioethics commission which instead “offers practical policy options.”

Dr. Alta Charo, an ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, told the Times that a new bioethics commission should form an ethically defensible public policy for the government instead of being what she said “seemed more like a public debating society.”

The presidential council’s mandate was set to expire in September. The group still had one last meeting and some reports to finish, including one on organ markets, before they were abruptly dissolved with one day’s notice.

Translation: bring me some “ethicists” who see nothing wrong with cloning humans for experimentation.

The commission was due to disband in September in any event. Our president is evidently so eager to start playing Frankenstein that he just couldn’t wait:

The move has prompted speculation that the advisory committee’s public dissent from the President’s executive order to fund new lines of embryonic stem-cells and begin cloning human embryos for scientific research may have precipitated their dismissal.

Speculation? “May have precipitated their dismissal? For heaven’s sake, the White House is standing over the corpse with a smoking gun and people are speculating.

H/T: Eye of Plyphemus.