Callahan, Daniel. What Price Better Health? Hazards of the Research Imperative.

• Position: Book Review - Brief Review

Callahan, Daniel. What Price Better Health? Hazards of the Research Imperative. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2003; www.ucpress.edu.

The idea that we have an unlimited moral imperative to pursue medical research is deeply rooted in American society and medicine. In this work, Daniel Callahan exposes the ways in which such a seemingly high and humane ideal can be corrupted and distorted into a harmful practice.

Medical research, with its power to attract money and political support, and its promise of cures for a wide range of medical burdens, has good and bad sides, which are often indistinguishable. Here Callahan reveals the difficulties that result when the research imperative is suffused with excessive zeal, adulterated by the profit motive, or used to justify cutting moral corners...