Faculty Bibliography

Oregon has legalized and implemented physician-assisted suicide, while observers argue about the moral import of attempting to formulate guidelines; the utility any set of guidelines can have for physician practice, health care providers, patients, or families; and whether guidelines can really protect against harm or abuse. What were once theoretical questions have taken on new urgency. The debate over the value and power of guidelines includes the following questions: What has been the experience of efforts to implement physician-assisted suicide using consensus guidelines? What goals are guidelines intended to serve? Who should formulate guidelines? What features should be reflected in any proposed guidelines to make them practical and to permit achievement of their goals? Are there any fundamental obstacles to the creation or implementation of guidelines? Is dying a process that is amenable to direction under guidelines, be they issued by physicians, departments of health, blue ribbon panels, or other regulatory bodies? This paper explores these questions as physician-assisted suicide becomes legal.

Even though the explosion of information about the human genome is changing the face of the biotech, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries, consumers are not ready to embrace this brave new world. Those who want to unleash the power of the gene to cure diseases or to grow new forms of animals and plants must do so in secrecy. There are two reasons: the failure to fix a health care system that is not ready for a genetic revolution, and the failure to find ways to reach a consensus about the ethics of genetic engineering

I HEAR IT a lot - people are always grabbing me at cocktail parties or water coolers in order to complain, "I wish doctors were not so arrogant." This is not a sentiment that people express about their particular doctor. Most people actually like their personal doctor. But, in the abstract, when Americans are making up their list of who it is out there who has grown unsufferably enormous for their collective britches - doctors rank right up there

This is not a sentiment that people express about their particular doctor. Most people actually like their personal doctor. But, in the abstract, when Americans are making up their list of who it is out there who has grown insufferably enormous for their collective britches - doctors rank right up there

Just a year ago there was a burgeoning literature in the popular press bemoaning the slow pace of research in gene therapy. A lengthy article in The New York Times Magazine profiled the problems faced by the parents who could not get their little boy, who was severely disabled by Canavan's disease, enrolled in a gene-therapy experiment. The key question raised in the article was: Why is the pace of gene therapy so slow? This is the same magazine that a year later finds itself wondering how the pace of gene therapy could be permitted to be so fast