The Birth of Bioethics.

• Position: Review

Jonsen, Albert R. The Birth of Bioethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

This book designates the forty years between 1947 and 1987 as the era during which bioethics emerged as a distinct discipline and discourse. In 1947, the Nuremberg Tribunal convicted twenty-three physicians of war crimes committed under the guise of medical experiments, and it promulgated the Nuremberg Code. That event opens the book because it initiated an examination by professional persons in science, medicine, and law of one of modern medicine's central features: scientific research. The next two decades were a prologue to bioethics, during which questions accumulated and scientists, physicians, and sometimes the public expressed genuine but diffuse concern about the ethical problems raised by medical and scientific advances.

The first chapter of this book recalls the long tradition of medical ethics that precedes bioethics and the public expression of concern by many scientists during the 1960s. The second and...