Bioethics in America: Origins and Cultural Politics.

Stevens, Mi. Tina. Bioethics in America, Origins and Cultural Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000;.

The author, history professor at San Francisco State University, challenges the view that the origins of the bioethics movement can be found in the 1960s, a decade of challenges to all variety of authority Instead she finds its roots in the responsible science movement that emerged following detonation of the atomic: bomb.

Rather than challenging authority, she argues that the bioethics movement was an aid to authority, in that it allowed medical doctors and researchers to proceed on course while bioethicists managed public fears about medicine's new technologies. That is, the public was reassured by bioethical oversight of biomedicine; in reality, however, bioethicists belonged to the same mainstream that produced the doctors and researchers whom the bioethicists were guiding.

After tracing the origins of the movement, Stevens turns to an analysis of the Hastings Center, the nation's first bioethics institute, where the independence of early bioethicists was compromised by...