In Memoriam

K. Danner Clouser
1930-2000

Bioethics lost one of its pioneers 14 August 2000, with the death of K. Danner Clouser from pancreatic cancer after a five-year illness. Dan Clouser developed one of this generation's first medical school humanities courses at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine beginning in 1968. Many teachers of bioethics have learned from his experience and gentle coaching. Known for his enormous good humor, Al Jonsen has called him "the wittiest ethicist." His wry, subtle humor and gracious modesty sometimes hid a sharp intellect that led to some of academia's finest intellectual exchanges.

He completed a Bachelor of Divinity degree from The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in 1955 before turning to philosophy in which he completed his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1961. He taught briefly at Dartmouth College and Carlton College before moving to Penn State where he spent most of his career, retiring in the mid-1990s as University Professor of Humanities, Emeritus. His stay at Dartmouth led to a summer home in the Hanover area and a life-long professional collaboration with Dartmouth colleagues such as Bernard Gert, Charles Culver, and Ronald M. Green. They are sometimes known as the "Dartmouth Group." Along with Gert and Culver, he published Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals in 1997, which has been a significant contribution to bioethics theory.

He was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, and the author of many articles in the field, including "Common Morality as an Alternative to Principlism," published in a special 1995 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal based on an Institute course. Last year a Festschrift entitled Building Bioethics: Conversations with Clouser and Friends on Medical Ethics, edited by Loretta M. Kopelman, was published by Kluwer. He will be remembered by many in the field of bioethics as a participant on the faculty of courses in bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and as the chairman of several Hastings Center bioethics workshops. He was a Senior Member of the Institute of Medicine and the recipient of the Hastings Center's Henry Knowles Beecher Award for lifetime contributions to ethics and the life sciences.

Thomas J. King
1921-2000

Thomas J. King, the second director of the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics, died 31 October 2000, of cancer. He took over the leadership of the Institute at the critical period following the death of the Institute's founder, André Hellegers, and the 14-month search for a new director during which The Rev. Richard A. McCormick served in an acting capacity.

Dr. King was trained as an embryologist. Before coming to the Kennedy Institute, he held positions as professor in Georgetown's departments of biology and of obstetrics and gynecology before becoming chair of the department of embryology at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and then Director of the Division of Cancer Research Resources and Centers at the National Cancer Institute. During his first stay at Georgetown, he served as a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute. While at the Philadelphia institution, he pioneered in the scientific development of cloning. In 1952, together with colleague Robert W. Briggs, he devised the microsurgical technique of transferring the nucleus of a tadpole to a denucleated frog egg, cloning a new frog. The work led to the awarding of the Charles Leopold Mayer Prize of the Académie de Science of the Institut de France in 1972.

In 1980, he came back to Georgetown University and assumed the leadership of the Kennedy Institute. He served in that capacity until, in 1983, he became the deputy director of Georgetown's Lombardi Cancer Research Center. He retired in 1990. He is survived by his second wife, Hannah May Lyddane King; a daughter, Deborah Kurz; stepdaughters Deborah Trilling and Hannah May Batty; and two grandchildren. Marion King, his first wife, died in 1989. Matthew McNulty, who at the time of Dr. King's appointment to the Institute was the Chancellor of Georgetown...