From Schiavo to Sicko to stem cells, the public is paying increased attention to bioethical issues, both to familiar concerns such as health care reform and to newer topics emerging out of biotechnology. The drumbeat of news around these topics grows louder. However, understanding too often falls prey to sound bites and polarization, and policymaking suffers. This is a risky business, as the decisions we make as a society around these issues have the potential to change how we are born, how we live, and how we die. Public policy on these issues is particularly important at this juncture. The 2008 presidential candidates have positions on abortion, cloning, health care reform, and stem cells, and Congress has introduced or is debating legislation on personalized medicine, health care reform, end- of-life care, abortion, clinical trials, nanotechnology, and torture, among other bioethics issues.

From Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns is an effort to enhance knowledge and inform debate around these matters. The essays that follow this introduction illustrate just what is at stake for journalists and policymakers at the front lines of these critical issues. Hastings Center President Tom Murray describes the growing relevance of bioethics to public policy and the impetus for this volume; Center cofounder Dan Callahan reflects on the historical role of bioethics in policy, and its particular relevance to health care reform; and TIME magazine editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs encourages journalists to pave the way in a “whole new kind of conversation” about what it means to be human--one in which “bioethicists play a fateful role.”

The 36 topical entries that follow are designed to give journalists, policymakers, and political campaigns the tools they need to best write about and respond to the challenges posed by advances in medicine and science that directly affect individuals, families, and communities. This volume is grounded in the Hastings Center mantra that good ethics begins with good facts. Hence each of the entries includes a careful description of the relevant science, social science, statistics, legal history, and other research. As for the bioethical considerations at the heart of the entries: The Hastings Center methodology, refined over four decades as a way to approach often thorny ethical concerns, is nonpartisan and multidisciplinary. It is also multiperspective--all reasonable voices deserve to be heard, with the aim of finding, if not consensus, then at least understanding and respect.

The entries in this volume aspire to that standard. While the authors come from a range of disciplines, and from various political and moral positions, each has strived to present the full range of perspectives on a given topic. The author’s position is often clear, but so are the positions of those who feel differently. The goal is to provide the Briefing Book’s readers with a comprehensive starting place from which to write an article, seek guests for a television interview, find experts to testify in Congress, or seek the bipartisan solutions that are at the heart of our social system.

How to Use This Book

The 36 entries in The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book are arranged alphabetically and cross-referenced within each article. The online edition is searchable and features printable pdfs. Each entry includes:

• a bulleted highlights box
• experts to contact, with phone numbers and e-mail addresses
• a resources box for further information, including Web sites, recent news stories, and further reading. Links are available online where possible.

The volume also includes an appendix of relevant legislation and an online-only campaign appendix. The resource box for each entry has an icon directing you to either appendix if there is relevant legislation or a campaign position on the topic. It is our intent to update the legislation appendix periodically online, and to revise the campaign appendix for mid-term and other elections. 

We welcome your feedback, both on this edition, and on future ones. 

Acknowledgements

From Birth to Death and Bench to Bedside: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns was made possible by generous funding from The Greenwall Foundation and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. Particular thanks are owed to President William C. Stubing of The Greenwall Foundation, for his invaluable insights and interest in the Briefing Book’s progress, and for the Foundation’s longstanding support of bioethics in general and The Hastings Center in particular. The Center also is pleased to embark on its first project with Lounsbery Foundation support, and thanks Executive Director Maxmillian Angerholzer III for championing it. The book comes out of The Hastings Center’s Department of Public Affairs and Communications, whose creation was made possible by a very generous grant from the Ford Foundation. We are especially grateful to Susan Berresford, former president of the Ford Foundation, whose belief that bioethics matters has been transformative.

The Center’s entire research, editorial, and communications departments pulled together and worked tirelessly to produce a volume that would prove useful to its audiences while upholding The Hastings Center’s standards for scholarly and editorial excellence. Art director Nora Porter, staff writer Susan Gilbert, copy editor Joyce Griffin, communications associate Michael Turton, and research assistants Polo Black Golde, Alison Jost, and Jacob Moses deserve special mention, as do editorial director Greg Kaebnick and president Tom Murray, for their editorial guidance. The Center also thanks its partner in Washington, D.C., the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and especially Joanne Padrón Carney, Mark Frankel, Erin Heath, and Al Teich.

Most importantly, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the authors of the framing essays and the 36 chapters, who were drawn from the international circle of Hastings Center Scholars, Fellows, and friends. It is not easy to condense years of scholarly work into 1,800 words, in language that is accessible to nonscholarly audiences. Their belief that bioethics matters to the world informs their work and is at the heart of this briefing book, and we are proud to count them as colleagues.

Finally, many thanks to our Advisory Board, who helped with editorial decisions and continues to help with outreach strategy and evaluation:

• Andrew S. Adelson, MBA, Board of Directors, The Hastings Center
• Myra Christopher, President and Chief Executive Officer, Center for Practical Bioethics
• Bill Erwin, Communications Director, Alliance for Health Reform
• Alan Fleischman, MD, Board of Directors, The Hastings Center, and Senior Vice President and Medical Director, March of Dimes
• Gregory E. Kaebnick, PhD, Editorial Director,The Hastings Center
• Faith McLellan, PhD, North American Senior Editor, The Lancet
• Thomas H. Murray, PhD, President, The Hastings Center
• Ivan Oransky, MD, Managing Editor, Online, Scientific American
• Stuart Schear, Communications and Policy Executive, The Atlantic Philanthropies
• Bonnie Steinbock, PhD, Professor of Philosophy, University at Albany/State University of New York
• Albert H. Teich, PhD, DIrector, Science & Policy Programs, American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Erin D. Williams,JD, Specialist in Public Policy, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (Ms. Williams is participating independently; CRS has not reviewed this book.)