Reflecting on Early Bioethics: Fleck and Tomlinson - Episode 9

What issues were bioethicists concerned with in the early days of the field? This episode features two senior faculty members from the MSU Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences, Director Tom Tomlinson, PhD, and Professor Len Fleck, PhD. Together they discuss and reflect on the accidental ways in which they entered the field of bioethics in the ‘70s and ‘80s, also touching on the creation of the program that became the Center for Ethics around that same time. They discuss the changes they’ve seen around topics such as death and dying, advance directives, and advances in medical technologies. Finally, they speculate on where bioethics may be headed in the future.

This episode was produced and edited by Liz McDaniel in the Center for Ethics. Music: "While We Walk (2004)" by Antony Raijekov via Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. A full episode transcript is available at bioethics.msu.edu.