Brave New Bioethics

For nearly 30 years, Gregory E. Pence's name has appeared in the by-lines of headlining newspaper articles in bioethics. Pence, one of America's pioneering bioethicists, has never been afraid to go his own way or stir up a little controversy. Brave New Bioethics gathers 35 of his most influential and groundbreaking op-ed pieces and essays into one broad-ranging volume on issues such as cloning, AIDS, dignified death, and test-tube babies. These distinctive, lively commentaries have graced the pages of such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

For nearly 30 years, whenever Bioethics has been in the headlines, Gregory E. Pence's name has been in the by-line. Brave New Bioethics gathers 35 of Pence's most influential, groundbreaking, and personal essays into one broad-ranging volume.

Publishers Weekly

Although the 34 previously published essays in this collection reveal little that is either brave or new, Pence (Designer Food) revels in challenging media stereotypes of bioethics as well as conservative philosophical positions on cloning and assisted reproduction. These short pieces range widely over topics including reproductive and therapeutic cloning, assisted reproduction, organ donation, assisted suicide, genetically modified foods and public health care costs. Pence contends that the media have often misrepresented human cloning by reporting that it would produce an identical person to the donor. In fact, he argues, a human clone can never be an exact copy of the donor because the clone will grow up in different social and parenting environments. Pence also argues for lifting the ban on federally funded fertility research on embryos to benefit infertile couples for whom in vitro fertilization is too expensive. The collection would have been more valuable, however, if Pence had linked the essays with some common themes and eliminated redundancies. Moreover, a good many of these pieces feel old, dating from the 1980s and early '90s, in an area that changes dramatically almost weekly. Still, those interested in bioethics will find Pence's views an interesting contrast with those of Leon Kass presented in Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (Forecasts, Sept. 9). (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Gregory E. Pence is a medical ethicist with twenty years of experience reviewing significant cases in bioethics, and is professor in the School of Medicine and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. He is the author of Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? (1998) and Designer Food (2001).