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Comparative effectiveness research tends to focus on head-to-head comparisons of treatment approaches: Is A more effective than B? What does the evidence say? From these comparisons, the research aims to [...]

There are many good reasons for a merger between bioethics and human rights. First, though, significant philosophical groundwork must be done to clarify what a human right to health would [...]

American bioethicists lack the theoretical resources to work in cross-cultural settings. All we have are two approaches to ethics--principles vs. narratives--that are mostly at odds, and neither of which is [...]

To the Editor: D. Alan Shewmon's work over the last decade has clearly awakened the bioethics community from its dogmatic slumbers. Easy acceptance of the "somatic integration" rationale for equating [...]

The view now often dubbed 'liberal eugenics' holds that people should be able to choose genetic enhancements for their offspring, should these become safely available. This view is opposed by [...]

Outside the conference room at the American I Enterprise Institute, the nation's preeminent conservative think tank, two books were recently on display. The first, written by David L. Kaserman and [...]

Why is 'physician frustration,' rather than health or access to health care, the anchor for this new statement of medical professionalism? Why do the wealthiest nations, with the best health, [...]

Over the last three decades, the genomics revolution, legal precedents, and policy priorities have significantly contributed to the commercialization of science in the United States and around the world. Judicial [...]

While I was in graduate school my family and I frequently ate Sunday lunch out with several other families. On one occasion our group was joined by an elderly couple [...]

It is widely recognized that a humanistic approach to medicine requires more of clinicians than adherence to ethical principles. A deeply felt, sincere regard for patients' well-being--an approach that has [...]

Without much public notice, health care is entering a crisis. The events of 11 September and the Enron collapse have made that crisis more imminent, serious, and even more likely [...]

Suppose 'chicken' eggs could be produced by quasi-chickens--genetically engineered humps of living chicken-flesh that do nothing but lay eggs. Would there be anything amiss with that? Animal ethicists invoke the [...]

Although sex selection calls for careful thought, it seems in many cases to be neither intrinsically objectionable nor likely to have bad consequences. Let me start with the obvious. Sexism [...]

Popular media may make short shrift of complex ideas and moral deliberations, but it can also serve bioethics well. Bioethics should embrace the ritual function of the media in bringing [...]

As our society debates the legalization of physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill persons, mandatory psychiatric evaluation has been suggested as a safeguard against abuse. This is to guarantee that the [...]

The whole-brain concept of death is under attack again. That this attack should occur in the late 1990s is of particular interest because the whole-brain concept of death now has [...]

Rethinking the goals of medicine should help address three important practical questions: what should be the future priorities of biomedical research? What are the implications of the goals of medicine [...]

The law is America's greatest strength, but sometimes also its greatest curse, when it gets in the vicinity of ethics. No myth is so hardy as the notion that 'you [...]

We want now to specify what we take to be appropriate contemporary goals for medicine and, at the same time, to justify those goals and to take account of the [...]

Conflicts between staff and family regarding the care of elderly and incompetent patients have dominated my own involvement in clinical ethics consultations, and that of many of my colleagues. These [...]

For more than a century, our culture has largely swallowed the positivistic idea that religion and science are competitors, alternative practices belonging to separate tribes--one tribe being childish and the [...]

Not long ago, the New York Times reported that the National Association of the Deaf in the U.S. protested against cochlear implants in children.[1] This is a new technology, translating [...]

Why is informed consent required for prenatal testing? Consent is routinely sought, but examination of the theory behind and the implementation of informed consent for prenatal testing suggests that we [...]

Our purpose in this paper is to identify issues relevant to the development of effective and defensible hospital policies supporting physician judgments not to provide futile resuscitation. As we are [...]

The debate over the ethics of physician-assisted death has suffered from inadequate analysis of professional integrity. Some who would permit it have tended to ignore professional integrity as a source [...]

In Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift gives a portrait of the Struldbruggs, a race condemned to immortality without the blessing of good health: 'They were the most mortifying sight I ever [...]

The remarkable developments in biomedical research and technology of the past quarter century have made the human body not simply a subject of study and observation, but an object of [...]

In a notorious passage of The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche portrays a madman carrying a lantern in broad daylight and searching for God. Nietzsche's mirthless character then declares that 'God [...]

The warrant for medicine in every culture is the universal existence of sickness and suffering and the need for relief. Perhaps always, but certainly in the last two centuries, in [...]

Duty to Treat or Right to Refuse? Although AIDS is novel, one of the moral problem it poses is not: Do physicians and other health care workers have a moral [...]

Justified Limits on Refusing Intervention Respect for the autonomy of the patient is a dominant ethical principle in the literature on biomedical ethics, particularly in the literature on refusal of [...]

Robert J. Moss is co-director, Section of Geriatric Medicine, and Clinical Ethics Scholar-in-Residence, Lutheran General Hospital. John La Pluma is director, Center for Clinical Ethics, Lutheran General Hospital, Park Ridge, [...]

Marion Danis is a professor in the department of medicine and Larry R. Churchill is a professor in the department of social medicine at the University of North Carolina at [...]

The new reproductive technologies force us to rethink the concepts `mother,' `father,' `family.' As we draw analogies to traditional patterns, we must distinguish between ethical and conceptual questions. Ruth Macklin [...]

In the past three decades, researchers have been able to make many mammalian cells grow as cell lines in culture. These cell lines have been essential to the growth of [...]

Richard M. Schultz, associate Professor of pharmacy practice, College of pharmacy, University of South Carolina, Columbia; David B. Brushwood is professor of pharmacy health care administration College of Pharmacy, University [...]

Reassessing Autonomy in Long-Term Care Long-term care is an increasingly important subject for bioethical reffection and analysis, yet when viewed through the spectacles of autonomy, the pivotal concept of much [...]

Noncompliance in AIDS Research From Nuremberg to the mid-1980s, the ethics of research has concentrated exclusively on the rights of patient-subjects. Noncompliance with protocols--either lying to get in a study [...]

An Alternative To Property Rights in Human Tissue Recent developments in biotechnology involving human tissue are sweeping our interactions with this material well beyond the boundaries of existing law. Some [...]

Joint ventures by physician entrepreneurs may introduce an intolerable conflict of interest into the heart of patient care, eroding patient trust and professional esteem. In 1986 a national chain opened [...]

Members of an institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) spend much of their time inspecting laboratories and care facilities, and studying regulations. Yet one of their most important duties [...]

Modernizing Mortality: Medical Progress and the Good Society In Condorcet's history of human progress, published in 1795, he wrote the memorable words that to this day animate the enterprise of [...]

Folling with Mother Nature In 1816 Mary Godwin (Shelley to be) was holidaying in the Swiss mountains near Geneva, staying at the Villa Diodati. 'It proved a wet ungenial summer [...]

The Place of Autonomy in Bioethics I come not to bury autonomy, but to praise it. Yet my praise is somewhat muted; for autonomy merits only two cheers, not three. [...]

Mr. A is a fifty-five-year-old man who became quadriplegic eight years ago after suffering a spinal cord injury during a drunk driving accident. Once recovered, he investigated visiting nurse services [...]

We had asked Stuart Youngner and Robert Arnold to discuss, in part, the conflicts affecting Baruch Brody and his colleagues in writing a report about bioethicists' conflicts of interest. Since [...]

The premise of this report was this: that further discussions of health care reform should not satisfy themselves solely with debates about the organization and financing of health care systems. [...]

The goals of medicine are rich and diverse. The capacity of medicine to articulate pain, suffering, and impairment in secular terms, and to make sense of them in part by [...]

In recent years, a substantive ethic for the ends of medicine (one going beyond process values such as honesty) has often been taken for dead--as the scary fossil of Paternalosaurus [...]

Precisely eighteen years ago, this journal began carrying a regular feature initially entitled 'Law and the Life Sciences.' The column's title seemed especially apt since the Center itself was then [...]