Over the past few years, a great debate has begun about the beginning of life and the ends of medicine. The debate has often overlapped with the deep divide over abortion rights, but it is becoming clear that the ethics and politics of embryo research present new challenges and new problems. Nearly two years after President Bush announced his stem cell decision, embryo research proceeds apace, with no regulation, in the private sector, while the silver bullet of immediate cures has yet to materialize. What are we to think and what are we to do? How do we separate the embryo research debate, the abortion debate, and the debate over new techniques for making babies like human cloning and genetic screening? What lessons do the great debates of the past-such as slavery and civil rights-have to teach us? Will embryo research be a major subject in the upcoming presidential election? And will anyone emerge to offer a compromise-one that both pro-lifers and pro-biotech researchers can accept?

Eric Cohen is director of the Project on Biotechnology and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics. His essays and articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Weekly Standard, Public Interest, First Things, and Commentary, and he is the co-editor (with William Kristol) of The Future is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics. He was previously a fellow at the New America Foundation and Managing Editor of The Public Interest. He is the founding editor of The New Atlantis, a new quarterly journal on technology and society.