US President Barack Obama abruptly dissolved the President's Council on Bioethics in late June, with one day's written notice to members stating that their services were no longer needed. With its two-year term having been scheduled to end in September, the Council was set to meet one more time. A new commission is expected to be named by Obama by this fall, and it will be charged with developing actionable solutions to range of emerging technology issues.

“The abruptness of its dismissal smacks more of politics than a reasoned consideration of issues,” says David Prentice, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, a conservative organization based in Washington, DC.

But Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, holds a different view. “I think we will see a real attempt to get beyond the culture wars of the past eight years,” he says.

“It came as no surprise to us that President Obama wanted to develop a council of his own that would reflect his goals,” says Ruth Faden of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore, Maryland. “It's not unusual for presidents to want their own advisory committees.” The current council was established in 2001 by President George W. Bush, replacing President Bill Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Committee.

Although names of potential members had not yet become public as Nature Medicine went to press, Moreno anticipates that the composition of the new council will differ dramatically from the past: “I expect we will not see more of the usual suspects.” Rather than choosing bioethicists from a range of disciplines, Moreno expects that membership will draw on a wider range of distinguished experts and leaders in science and industry. The council is likely to communicate its findings to the public in the form of podcasts rather than just written reports, Moreno speculates.

“From the beginning, the President's Council on Bioethics found itself engulfed in conservative issues,” says Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics institute based in Garrison, New York and a member of Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Committee from 1996 to 2001. Since the first presidential bioethics advisory group was convened, the issues deliberated have tended toward the controversial: clinical research ethics in the 1970s, definitions of death in the 1980s and gene patenting, cloning and stem cell research in the late 1990s.

The next Council might weigh in on a wide range of issues, including the types of research the government should fund, the role of information technology in healthcare, organ donation, the implications of personalized medicine and the treatment of patients in clinical trials.

Although some issues might be politically sensitive, Faden does not think they need to be politically divisive: “Part of the art form of the new commission will be finding issues that they can move on.”