What's bioethics? It's a field that didn't exist 40 years ago but is central to today's world of medicine. It's a field that looks for answers to medicine's virtually unanswerable ethical quandaries. And it's the topic of the new issue of Stanford Medicine magazine, which just went online.
The stories in the theme package include:
A look at bioethics at midlife. Forty years after the field's birth, the work that bioethicists do is changing.
A story on perspectives on using surgery to "fix" the sex of children born with ambiguous gender.
A feature on the quandary of patients who seek treatment with stem cells, despite the fact that those treatments are unproven and might even harm them.
An article on expanding the supply of transplant organs by broadening the definition of death for donors.
A Q&A with the father of Jesse Gelsinger, who at 18 became the first person to die as a result of a gene therapy clinical trial.
Illustration by Gérard Dubois
