The hidden cost of health care

摘要

This book is intended for a wide general audience, but if you are a biomedical scientist, you would be well advised to read it. For the philosopher Daniel Callahan presents what might just be the strongest case for putting you out of business. Callahan founded the Hastings Center, a bioethics research centre in New York state, and was its director for three decades. For much of that time he has wondered about the value of biomedical research. What Price Better Health? constitutes the crescendo of his dissatisfaction with the biomedical enterprise. Biomedical research has set itself up inside an unassailable moral fortress, argues Callahan. Its main moral weapon is what he dubs the 'research imperative' ― the idea that research must proceed regardless of the cost or risk. No downside can trump the research imperative, because a cure for all that ails us, and possibly a potion to stave off death itself, could be cpntained within the next grant proposal, embedded in the next biotech start-up, or just around the corner of the next widely touted new idea (be it fetal-tissue research, gene therapy, embryo research, xenografting, artificial organs, stem-cell research or genomics, for example). What hope is there for those who want to challenge the way that biomedical research is done, when to do so they must stand in the way of the research imperative, and thus in the path of progress?