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Being well.

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JOHN Sperling, a man who has been called the Howard Hughes of biotechnology, has $3 billion and a dream: to retard aging and extend human longevity. According to a recent article in Wired magazine, he intends to found an endowment generating at least $150 million a year for biotech research. "I am 100 percent for human enhancement!" he told the magazine. "The more you can get, the better! What do we want? To improve the quality of human life to maximize happiness, right?" His dream is the worry of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, which is headed by Leon R. Kass.

Worrying is this council's job description. "The benefits from biomedical progress are clear and powerful," states the council in its recent report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Happiness. ([dagger]) "The hazards are less well appreciated, precisely because they are attached to an enterprise we all cherish and support and to goals nearly all of us desire." The council's determination to peer relentlessly into the darker side of human biological enhancement might have made for 300 pages of the sort of grandiloquent droning for which federal blue-ribbon commissions are renowned. Instead, Beyond Therapy is a kind of miracle.

Anyone who has worked in Washington, D.C., knows that, upon receiving a government report, the first thing to do is flip to the end and read the angry minority dissent. But the council's report, the work of its 17 members and Kass, is unanimous. The second thing to do with normal government reports is skim the obligatory recommendations for reform. But this report includes not even one recommendation. Well, then, surely the report must be pabulum. But to the contrary, it is a work of uncommon distinction--not least for literary merit. In its ability to turn a phrase, to touch profundity without pomposity, it astonishes time and again. "Pleasure follows in the wake of the activity and, as it were, lights it up into consciousness." When was the last time you read a sentence like that in a government report? Read this passage aloud: "A flourishing human...

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