The story's protagonist, an alchemist named Aylmer, convinces his wife Georgiana that he can safely remove a hand-shaped birthmark from her cheek, the lone blemish of an otherwise perfect physical specimen. Tragically, Aylmer removes the birthmark but unintentionally kills Georgiana in the process. Writes Hawthorne, "the fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame."
Hawthorne's tale, says PCB chairman Leon Kass, is a commentary on the implications of "trying to eliminate all signs of our mortality and finitude." According to Kass, who is on leave from the University of Chicago's Committee for Social Thought, the discussion was part of an effort to "develop the terms of a richer and deeper bioethics that does full justice to the issues." This is just one of several difficult assignments that the new panel, with its ...
