The Birth of Bioethics

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Summary: Bioethic's "Birth": Jonsen Must Be Read
Review: Dr. Albert Jonsen's book, THE BIRTH OF BIOETHICS, is extraordinary for its historical sweep and accurate documentation of the new field of bioethics. It is a wealth of facts about this new field, some inaccessible to many, written by one of the original Founders of the field. Of particular interest is his historical documentation of bioethics' formal birth by a Congressional mandate in the National Research Act 1974. This Act called for the appointment of a governmental National Commission, one of whose mandates was to identify the "ethical" principles that the federal government should use in the use of human subjects in research. The 11-member National Commission's Belmont Report (1979) did just that, articulating formally for the first time the bioethics principles of autonomy, justice and beneficence. As a First Generationer in this new field, I very much enjoyed Dr. Jonsen's filling in the names, dates, places, etc., of the birth of this new academic field - now internationally applied - which I went on to study. Chunk full of documentation.