INTRODUCTION

The word, “bioethics,” was fashioned in 1970 by a biological scientist, Van Rensselaer Potter, to name his vision of a new conjunction of scientific knowledge and moral appreciation of the converging evolutionary understanding of humans in nature (Potter 1970). Hardly had the word been uttered by its author than it was appropriated to identify a related but much narrower vision: the ethical analysis of a range of moral questions posed to medical practice by the advances in the biomedical sciences and technologies. In 1971, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics was founded at Georgetown University to pioneer the development of a new field of joint research that its the Institute's founder, Andre Hellegers (1911–1979), chose to call “bioethics,” Warren Reich of the Institute began to plan The Encyclopedia of Bioethics in 1972, in which he defined bioethics as “the study of the ethical dimensions of medicine and the biological sciences” (Reich 1978, ⅹⅸ–ⅹⅹ; Reich 1995a). In 1974, Daniel Callahan, who founded the other major research institute in this new field, The Hastings Center, wrote an influential article entitled, “Bioethics as a Discipline” in which he suggested that this new field could develop itself into a unique discipline, using both the traditional methods of philosophical analysis and sensitivity to human emotion and to social and political influences with which medicine was practiced (Callahan 1973). This emerging discipline should be designed to serve those who were faced with the crucial decisions that arise within medicine.