NEW YORK — Call them the “Kass generation.”

A new bioethics and technology journal coming out of the Washington Beltway promises to address some of the leading issues of the day — the culture of life issues — in a fresh, clear way.

And it's being run by young professionals — almost fresh out of college — in a different generation than cloning opponent and medical doctor Leon Kass, head of the president's bioethics commission and a University of Chicago professor.

In fact, the editorial staff comprises all twenty-somethings. But they are, broadly speaking, from the Kass school of thinking.

The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society is a new journal put out quarterly by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The first issue includes pieces by historian Victor Davis Hanson and Gilbert Meilander, a theological ethics professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana.

As senior editor Christine Rosen said jokingly, “We editors of The New Atlantis are young mavericks intent on shaking up the technology/bioethics establishment a bit.”

The name of the new journal comes from a Francis Bacon fable from the 17th century. As editor Eric Cohen explained, the fable is about “what it would be like to remake, manipulate and reconfigure nature and human nature — both for better and for worse. It is, you might say, the creation story of modern life and modern science — and especially modern biotechnology.

“To a great extent,” Cohen said, “we live in the New Atlantis, and now we must find a way to live both morally and responsibly with both its burdens and its blessings. We need both an ethic of technology and a politics of technology. We must celebrate, defend and advance those areas of science and medicine that serve human excellence and human dignity; we must face squarely those areas of technology that threaten our very way of life; and we must set limits on those areas of science and experimentation that risk turning human life into a mere thing, a mere project or merely interchangeable and manipulable parts rather than a human whole.”

Yuval Levin, a staffer at the president's bioethics commission and an editor at The New Atlantis, said, “We're hoping to be a key source of ideas on science and technology for conservatives who recognize how important these issues will be to the country's future — to help folks be a little better informed about science and much better informed about what it means for society and politics. I think this first issue gets that tone across, but time will tell.”

And it's not only people who agree with The New Atlantis' politics, however, who are happy to see its creation.

“The New Atlantis recognizes that the politics of the 21st century will turn on technological issues, especially biotechnological advances,” said Ronald Bailey, a writer for the libertarian magazine Reason and a proponent of human cloning.

“The initial editorial by Eric Cohen is more skeptical of the blessings of modern technology than it needs to be, but one must salute the editors' intent to discuss these vital issues seriously,” Bailey noted.

In Kass' piece in the inaugural issue, an essay he originally delivered at the Technology and Society Lecture Series at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, he discusses the “deepest source of public anxiety about biotechnology”: the pursuit of perfection.

“It raises the weightiest questions of bioethics, touching on the ends and goals of the biomedical enterprise, the nature and meaning of human flourishing, and the intrinsic threat of dehumanization (or the promise of super-humanization),” he says. “It compels attention to what it means to be a human being and to be active as a human being. And it gets us beyond our often singular focus on the ‘life issues’ of abortion or embryo destruction, important though they are, to deal with what is genuinely novel and worrisome in the biotechnical revolution: not the old crude power to kill the creature made in God's image but the new science-based power to remake him after our own fantasies.”

Except for some Internet bloggers worried about what they say is the magazine's “Luddite” approach, many signs are hopeful for The New Atlantis — on paper and in reality.

“The New Atlantis promises to be the journal that makes available to the educated public what needs to be thought about and done to bring technological progress under moral and political control,” said Peter Augustine Lawler, a Catholic and a professor at Berry College in Georgia, who has a piece on socio-biology in the first issue of The New Atlantis. “Every article is informed by a proper appreciation of the dignity of the human person as more, much more, than a pursuer of comfort and security. So the authors, whatever their differences, see that the limits and dangers of modern or ideological thought did not disappear but in fact grew with the fall of communism.”

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor of National Review Online.

Information

The New Atlantis www.thenewatlantis.com