In Bioethics in America, Tina Stevens challenges the view that the origins of the bioethics movement can be found in the 1960s, a decade mounting challenges to all variety of authority. Instead, Stevens sees bioethics as one more product of a ''centuries-long cultural legacy of American ambivalence toward progress,'' and she finds its modern roots in the responsible science movement that emerged following detonation of the atomic bomb. Rather than challenging authority, she says, the bioethics movement was an aid to authority, in that it allowed medical doctors and researchers to proceed on course while bioethicists managed public fears about medicine's new technologies. That is, the public was reassured by bioethical oversight of biomedicine; in reality, however, bioethicists belonged to the same mainstream that produced the doctors and researchers whom the bioethicists were guiding. After tracing the origins of the movement, Stevens turns to an analysis of the Hastings Center, the nation's first bioethics institute, where the independence of early bioethicists was compromised by the need to placate funding institutions intolerant of a critical portrayal of biomedicine. She then analyzes how bioethicists helped to establish the redefinition of death at a time when public fears were aroused that life support would routinely be prematurely discontinued in order to procure transplantable organs. In her final chapter, the author reexamines the Karen Quinlan case and its role in the rise of bioethics. In this case, public fears that doctors were using medical technology to artificially prolong life fueled a demand for bioethical opinion. But bioethical commentary ultimately failed to make known that the case had not increased a patient's right to die, but had merely freed physicians from the threat of criminal liability. Ironically, the Quinlan case was the unanticipated consequence of the new definition of death.
