So I received a basically gracious note from the White House that I would no longer be a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics at the end of the next business day.

Now, it would have been nice to have more notice. The Council had another meeting planned and a couple of major reports just about finished. There had been some assurance previously that we didn’t have to rush to finish our work. But these things happen, and it seems unlikely that there was any deliberate attempt to suppress anything we were about to say. Certainly it’s not surprising–and surely good news for the taxpayers–that the president terminates advisory councils and commissions he believes will be of no use to him.