Global Bioethics

Abstract

At the September 1992 Birth of Bioethics conference observing the 30th anniversary of the Seattle kidney dialysis program, Warren Reich discussed the “bilocated” birth of the term bioethics. He showed that the term bioethics was coined in Michigan by Van Rensselaer Potter and that the term was also apparently conceived of independently at about the same time in 1970–1971 in Washington, D.C., by Andre Hellegers and Sargent Shriver. Potter's work, like many similar works in the early 1970s, was concerned with the growing global biological crisis of human overpopulation, the destruction of species, and how to respond to these. He prefaced his bookBioethicswith a “Bioethical Creed for Individuals,” outlining duties to respond to this crisis in a meaningful and scientific way. Hellegers and Shriver used the neologism to name the new Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics. The Center was to study concerns somewhat different from Potter's: the technological revolution in healthcare and its impact on reproduction, investigator-patient relations, and medical ethics.