Biotechnology and the Human Good

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments READERS will notice that we do not identify an author for each chapter of this book. This directly reflects our methodology. After the book’s authors and external reviewers were chosen, the team met for a two-day retreat. Each of us presented our initial thoughts about the goals and content of the project. After extensive critiques, we agreed on a trajectory for the book. Next, each author presented a draft manuscript on one of the topics for the book. The drafts were reviewed by each author; by the project director, C. Christopher Hook, M.D.; and by several external reviewers, including Paige Comstock Cunningham, J.D., and Gilbert C. Meilaender, Ph.D. In addition, two reviewers outside North America commented on the essays—from Australia, Graham Cole, Ph.D., and from Ireland, Stephen Williams, Ph.D.—providing welcome and helpful international perspectives. Additional feedback was received when second drafts of the material were presented to a larger audience during the ‘‘Remaking Humanity?’’ conference sponsored by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Bannockburn, Illinois. The ongoing conversation and collaboration continued as the team met twice to review the external feedback and self-critiques. The final review was completed early in 2006. We would especially like to thank the outside commentators for helping us focus our thinking. Without their extraordinarily helpful comments, the book would not have come together as it has. In sum, this book is the product of substantial longitudinal collaboration and conversation, with each person making significant contributions to each chapter of the whole. xiv Acknowledgments We are very grateful for the financial support this project has received from the William H. Donner Foundation, New York, and from Fieldstead & Company, Irvine, California, and for administrative support from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. Our deepest thanks go to the project editor, Louise Kaegi, M.A., who gave the book one voice. Louise writes on health care, ethics, education , and cultural politics, was formerly executive editor of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations’ Joint Commission Benchmark newsletter, and has written articles on health care for other newsletters, such as Minority Nurse. We would also like to thank Michael Sleasman, a doctoral candidate and friend at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in Deerfield, Illinois, for his bibliographic assistance with a part of the project. This book belongs largely in the genre of bioethics. Bioethics may be the most salient contemporary example of interdisciplinary research. If there were ever a time when one scholar, working solely in her office, could become an expert on all the topics under her discipline, that day has passed. With the explosive development of biotechnology, the burgeoning growth of specialties and subspecialties, and the large output of literature, collaborative research will be increasingly necessary. We applaud Chris Hook’s vision for the type of deep collaboration represented in this volume. Likewise, we are grateful to Georgetown University Press and its director, Richard Brown, for recognizing the importance of this work. We hope that other presses will understand how important collaborative research is in this area and will support colleagues in their joint labors in bioethics. ...