Overview

The focus of my course is much more upon medical ethics than bioethics.  The distinction is not always observed, but when it is, bioethics usually denotes "the study of ethical issues arising in the practice of the biological disciplines," including all the health care professions (e.g., medicine, nursing, veterinary medicine) and the biological sciences, such as environmental ethics and "various sociopolitical moral issues, including the adverse effects on people's health of unemployment, poverty, unjust discrimination, crime, war, and torture" (Raanan Gillon, "Bioethics Overview," in 1 Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics (Academic Press, 1998, Ruth Chadwick, ed.).  The Web resources that follow are mostly concerned with medical ethics. 

Another way to view medical ethics is as a subset of medical humanities, including medicine and the arts (e.g., medicine and music, literature and medicine), medicine and history, health care economics, medical anthropology and sociology, and the like.  I have collected some of the literature-related web materials on my Law, Literature & Medicine/Web Resources page, and I invite you to visit that page, as well.  If research on a bioethics topic leads you to health- or health-law-related topics, try my Health Care Law/Web Resources page.  If all you need is to find a bioethics statute or regulation (state or federal), go to my Law/Web Resources page. 

My goal has been to create a short and useful list of links that will, within a click or two of where you are right now, lead you to most of the important and resource-rich sites on the Web. 

I.  Starting points  

A.  Generic research resources

  • Google and Yahoo! -- Although a links page like the one you're reading right now can be useful, I usually start my Web searches with a visit to Google or Yahoo!  They are easy to search, and the results are often extraordinarily good.  See also search engines on my Search page and a longer list on my WWW Links page.
  • "Librarians' Internet Index"  --  If Google and Yahoo! don't yield the results you are looking for, try this site from the Berkeley Public Library. It has a wonderful collection of very carefully selected sites on every Health & Medicine topic, including a good "Best of Health & Medicine" page.
  • A good all-purpose search engine for legal materials (state and federal; judicial, legislative, and regulatory) is maintained by Georgia State University's School of Law.  Other law-search sites include FindLaw and "Law Library on the Net."

B.  Bioethics starting points

II.  Research sources by topic

A.  Abortion

B. Animal ethics

C.  Death and dying

1. Generic WWW coverage

2. Brain death & PVS

3. Advance directives (and related end-of-life issues), including state-specific forms

4. Physician-assisted suicide

  • U.S. Supreme Court materials  (opinions in Washington v. Gluckberg and Vacco v. Quill; lower-court and state materials from Washington, Oregon, and the Ninth and Second Circuits; briefs of the parties and many amici). 
  • See also University of Pennsylvania's collection of amicus briefs (click on "assisted suicide" in the left-side menu).
  • Also, Yahoo! does a pretty good job of updating its "Assisted Suicide & Euthanasia" section.
  • The Oregon experience: Oregon's Department of Human Resources' Oregon Health Division (OHD) has a Physician-Assisted Suicide page, including links to their annual reports. The main page also has links to the compliance forms, statute, and OHD regulations.

5. Palliative care and pain relief

6. Do-Not-Resuscitate (DNR) orders

7. Miscellaneous

C. Ethics codes
(see also:  Section III, below (my list of ethics resources by medical specialty)

D.  Presidential Commissions

1. President's Council on Bioethics (2001-)

2. National Bioethics Advisory Commission (1995-2001)

3. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments

E.  Genetics

1. General

2. Stem cells

3. Cloning

4. Associations, societies, etc.

5. Miscellaneous

F.  Human experimentation (see also: my health law pages)

1. Places to start

2. Miscellaneous

G.  International resources

  • The Danish Council of Ethics has its most recent annual reports on-line (priority-setting, euthanasia, abortion, assisted reproduction, psychiatric care, genetic engineering, etc.)
  • Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics
  • Biomedical Ethics: Newsletter of the European Network for Biomedical Ethics has all of its issues on-line in full-text.
  • Nuffield Council on Bioethics: The ethics of research related to healthcare in developing countries (April 25, 2002, 189 pp.)  (PDF)
  • Bayer International Bioethics Advisory Council

    H.  Reproduction

    I.  Theology and Bioethics

    1. Good starting point: Canadian Medical Association Journal: Series: Bioethics for Clinicians

    See also: Moral Theology/Ethics Links (from the Irish Theological Association)

    2. Judaism

    3. Buddhism

    4. Catholicism

    5. Islam

    J.  Transplantation

    1. Good starting points

    2. United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS)

    3. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS)

    4. Institute of Medicine reports

    5. Xenotransplantation

    6. Miscellaneous

    III.  On-line Ethics Resources by Specialty

    IV.  Institutional Links

    The main purpose of providing these links is to help students with their research for class projects (in those years that papers are part of the Bioethics course), directed research papers, and law review comments.  Accordingly, I have chosen and organized these links with that mission in mind.  Some pages are primarily intended to tell the world about the sponsoring organization's mission, publications, and conferences.  While this marketing function is important, it doesn't provide much help to researchers; thus, quite a few sites are missing from this list, solely because the sponsoring organizations have made their contributions to bioethics through activities other than maintaining a substantively rich Web page.