The Logic and Legitimacy of American Bioethics By Mary R. Leinho ...

The activities and transactions of bioethicists are in fact coming under increasing scrutiny. In September 2000, bioethicist Arthur Caplan was named a defendant in a lawsuit alleging fraud and negligence in the recruitment of a research subject, Jesse Gelsinger, who died during a gene therapy experiment; the bioethicist had helped write the informed-consent form used in the study (Gose, 2000).³ An August 2001 New York Times article raised concerns about the conflicts of interest bioethicists face when they accept donations and paid consultancies from corporations. Such predicaments are abetted by the lack of guidelines for bioethicists working with industry, and the fact that companies can pick and choose from a variety of expert bioethical viewpoints (Stolberg, 2001).

One need not search very long to find criticisms of bioethics, but locating comprehensive empirical studies that explore and verify such claims is more challenging. Although subdisciplines of sociology and anthropology are devoted to the study of medicine, social scientists have been slow to notice bioethics, with Renee Fox arguably pioneering the sociological study of bioethics (Fox, 1974, 1976; Fox & Swazey, 1974). To date, much of the sociology of bioethics has concentrated on the clinical setting, yielding ethnographic case studies of such diverse sites and issues as “medical morality” in China (Fox & Swazey, 1984), brain death and organ transplantation in the United States and Japan (Lock, 2001), the surgical ward (Bosk, 1979), and, in the United States, genetic counseling (Bosk, 1992; Ettorre 1999; Rapp 1998), intensive care units (Anspach, 1993; Zussman, 1992), alternative medicine (Frohock, 1992), and bioethics committees (Flynn 1991a, 1991b; Moreno, 1995). These studies have examined and affirmed the ways in which bioethical decision making at the bedside is shaped by its cultural, institutional, professional, and epistemic contexts.

Several scholars call for more cogent social science analysis of bioethics, and for the extension of study to other settings. Cooter (1995) found the literature on the history of medical ethics to be a “rather bloodless substitute for the political and social history of medical power, practice, and epistemology” (p. 263).