An Open Letter from the Director of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity

by C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D.

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	C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D., is former Director of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity. He is also associate professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, and editor of Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics.
	Post Date: December 22, 2006

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As we look forward to the 14th anniversary of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity, I am pleased to report that this past year has been a period of strategic achievement. A substantial part of that achievement can be tied directly to the strong support of people like you.

Thank you for your generous gifts and involvement. Your ongoing membership and gifts are a necessary part in achieving milestones like we have this past year.

2006 Summary

July’s annual conference in Deerfield was one of the highest rated in our history. The focus on neuroethics spoke to a clutch of issues facing everyone involved in clinical medicine, biotechnology, and bioethics.

The capstone of the conference was the talk given by Edmund Pellegrino, M.D., chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and his son, Tom Pellegrino, M.D., a neurologist and associate dean at Eastern Virginia Medical School. Drs. J. P. Moreland, Scott Rae, William Cheshire, and other speakers did a splendid job of addressing the promises and challenges of the neuroethics frontier.

One of the most encouraging aspects of the conference was the demographics. We saw an evident number of younger colleagues and about 30 percent were first-time attendees. Those numbers speak to the growing interest and health of bioethics.

Preparations are well under way for Bioethics Nexus: The Future of Healthcare, Science, and Humanity to be held July 12-14, 2007, on the campus of Trinity International University, in Deerfield, Illinois. Exciting speakers are already lined up, including Dr. Alvin Plantinga, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University, who is often identified as the most important Christian philosopher of the last 40 years.

Dr. Brent Waters, author of the new book, From Human to Posthuman, will bring a plenary address this year focusing on the future of humanity in a technologically oriented postmodern society. Dr. David Prentice, who has been traveling the world this year, will address global bioethics issues.

As always, speakers and networking groups will focus on clinical ethics, biotech ethics, and pastoral bioethics. Other speakers are being confirmed as this letter goes to print.

We birthed a number of educational initiatives this year, including the February launch of The Bioethics Podcast. Over 30 podcasts have been posted, making CBHD articles and insights available to the entire world.

The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity continues to work directly with media to help the public better understand the ethics of biomedicine, biotechnology, and the future of humanity. Depending on the day’s news, a great deal of my time is spent responding to media requests.

In addition, one major radio network invited Matthew Eppinette and me to conduct a two-hour seminar on reproductive ethics and stem cell research so that their producers and broadcasters would be better informed. We see this as a very exciting aspect of our educational mission.

The research work of the Center is moving full speed ahead. In the Spring, a new Center-initiated book will be published by Georgetown University Press. Biotechnology & the Human Good is a collaborative project by myself, Edmund Pellegrino, Jean Bethke Elshtain, John Kilner, and Scott Rae. Just behind that, Eerdmans will publish Daryl Charles’s new volume on bioethics and natural law. And other volumes are underway.

For instance, Dr. Robert Orr, director of the Center’s clinical ethics initiative, spent 3 wonderful months in Oxford as scholar in residence at The Kilns, the historic home of C. S. Lewis, writing his next book on clinical ethics. That book will hopefully be published in 2007.

The influence of the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity continues to be felt around the world. CBHD Fellow, Dr. Barbara White, spoke on behalf of the Center at an International Asia-Pacific Regional Conference in Seoul, Korea.

In addition, since becoming director of the Center in September, I have had the privilege of addressing the topic of the ethics of human enhancement at the Eugenics & Emerging Technologies conference held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and giving one of a series of public lectures sponsored by the Francis Schaeffer Institute in St. Louis, Missouri.

Center Senior Scholar, Dr. John Kilner, was honored by the Christian Medical & Dental Associations as Educator of the Year, and, among other opportunities, presented lectures at Harvard University. He also continues to direct the growing Master of Arts in Bioethics degree program—our partner here at Trinity.

Mentoring graduate students continues to be a major thrust of CBHD’s work. We currently have two interns: Hans Madueme, M.D., and Jessica Wroblicky, both of whom make crucial contributions to the Center’s work. We hope to add more interns in the future.

Soon after my arrival, we furnished and have begun to stock a bioethics library in the Center’s offices. Bioethics students now have access to targeted books, journals, and periodicals in bioethics. We hope to expand that library as resources become available.

Looking Ahead

As always, we are extremely grateful for those of you who give so faithfully to the Center. Your support means more than you can know. Limited resources challenge us to be good stewards both of our opportunities and your generous gifts. Neither a penny nor a calorie of energy can be wasted.

As you might imagine, there’s so much more that could be done but our choices are limited by what we can financially afford. For instance, with additional gifts:

• We hope to launch an annual warm-weather winter bioethics conference in 2008. Locations like Phoenix, Miami, and Los Angeles are attractive venues compared to February in Chicago!
• The Center’s primary website, cbhd.org, could receive a much needed overhaul.
• We could move CBHD even further into the locus of research by funding the publication of journal articles, books, and other scholarly resources.
• We hope to host several strategic consultations, bringing physicians, nurses, philosophers, ethicists, theologians, policy experts, and others together to frame, analyze, and recommend ways to address the rapidly emerging issues in bioethics—continuing the strategy that birthed the Biotechnology & the Human Good volume.
• We desire to establish a fully-funded bioethics lectureship at Trinity International University. Endowing a lectureship would ensure that students at Trinity College, Trinity Graduate School, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School get cutting-edge information from global leaders at the nexus of biomedicine, biotechnology, and bioethics.

Enlarge Your Membership with a Gift Today

Our primary goal is to use your financial support to build increasing value into the work of the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity. Accordingly, I urge you to consider what part you wish to have in this endeavor and make a gift at the level you deem appropriate. Your gift will assist the Center’s effort to make the world sensitive to the ethical frameworks that have shaped Western attitudes about human dignity and the goals of medicine and biotechnology.

As always, I welcome your suggestions, comments, and ideas for improvements concerning the Center. Over the first months of my service as director, your dialogue has been extraordinarily useful and I hope it continues to grow. I look forward to hearing from you.

With prayers for a prosperous New Year,

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D.
Director, The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity

P.S. Someone has said that the needs in bioethics are directly disproportionate to the resources available. Please help us reverse that trend.

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