The US President's Council on Bioethics was an organization headquartered in Washington D.C. that was chartered to advise then US President George W. Bush on ethical issues related to biomedical science and technology. In November 2001, US President George W. Bush created the President's Council on Bioethics (PCB). Convened during a nationwide cloning and embryonic stem cell research debate, the Council stated that it worked to address arguments about ethics from many different perspectives. The organization enacted a model for analyzing bioethical issues through deliberation instead of through the consensus approach. US President Barack Obama replaced the PCB in 2009 with his Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

In 2007, Françoise Baylis and Jason Scott Robert published “Part-Human Chimeras: Worrying the Facts, Probing the Ethics” in The American Journal of Bioethics. Within their article, hereafter “Part-Human Chimeras,” the authors offer corrections on “Thinking About the Human Neuron Mouse,” a report published in The American Journal of Bioethics in 2007 by Henry Greely, Mildred K. Cho, Linda F. Hogle, and Debra M. Satz, which discussed the debate on the ethics of creating part-human chimeras. Chimeras are organisms that contain two or more genetically distinct cell lines. Both publications discuss chimeras with DNA from different species, specifically in response to studies in which scientists injected human brain cells into mice. “Part-Human Chimeras,” contributes to a chain of ethical and scientific discussion that occurred in the mid-2000s on whether people should be able to conduct research on chimeras, especially in embryos.

In 1999, John Ancona Robertson, a researcher who studied bioethics and law, published “Ethics and Policy in Embryonic Stem Cell Research,” hereafter “Ethics and Policy,” in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. In the article, Robertson analyzes the ethical debates around research that uses human embryonic stem cells, or ESCs, and categorizes the different kinds of concerns within those debates. Researchers obtain human ESCs from human embryos. ESCs are pluripotent, which means they have the capability to transform into various cell types, such as skin cells or muscle cells. Robertson explains that ESCs have great medical potential, but since obtaining them requires destroying embryos, some people oppose the use of ESCs in research. After reviewing the main concerns present in debates over ESC research, he concludes that ESC research is still morally permissible. With “Ethics and Policy,” Robertson argued that ESC research should go forward and be federally funded in the US at a time when many politicians, bioethicists, and scientists opposed such research.