Bioethics goes global

Abstract

Peter A. Singer was director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto, Canada, and had run a standard bioethics programme for a decade before he felt that something was missing. “We did typical stuff, very worthwhile for local patients and local communities: improving end‐of‐life care, focusing on research ethics, and looking at issues of consent, genetics and ethics,” he said. But he was becoming increasingly concerned about the health crises in the developing world. “Life expectancies in industrialized countries are 80 years and rising; in many developing countries, they are 40 years and falling, largely as a result of HIV/AIDS,” he explained. Last June, Singer underwent a career—and paradigm—change: from thinking and acting locally to working on global health. Disparities in global health “are surely among the most significant ethical challenges in the world and I wanted to spend more of my time working on them,” he said. There are many more—and much larger—players taking up the challenge of resolving global health inequities. Computer software billionaire Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett are funnelling billions of dollars through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle, WA, USA). Gates, who has taken on the mantle of humanitarian with the same drive that he used to build his software empire, addressed the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2005: “The world is failing billions of people. Rich governments are not fighting some of the world's most deadly diseases because rich countries don't have them. The private sector is not developing vaccines and medicines for these diseases, because developing countries can't buy them. […] If these epidemics were raging in the developed world, people with resources would see the suffering and insist that we stop it. But sometimes it seems that the rich world can't even see the …