DEDICATORY ESSAY

When one reflects on the state of bioethics today-the frequent and prominent media attention to ethical issues in health care and biomedical research, the institutionalization of ethics committees in hospitals and other health care organizations, required courses in medical ethics in nearly all medical schools, and the burgeoning scholarly literature de-voted to theoretical and practical issues of bioethics-it may seem aston-ishing that this field has developed in only the last thirty years. John C. Fletcher, Ph.D., is one of the pioneers of bioethics, most of whom remain actively engaged in the field. Bioethics emerged in the middle 1960s in response to mounting ethical concern with the conduct of human experi-mentation. John Fletcher conducted research for his Ph.D. dissertation, "A Study of the Ethics of Medical Research,"one of the first dissertations in the field of bioethics, at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") during the period from 1966-1968. John Fletcher was born in Bryan, Texas in 1931. His family was unu-sual in that his parents, who were both deaf, raised four hearing children. Dr. Fletcher earned a B.A. in English literature from the University of the South in 1953, which forty years later awarded him an honorary de