Editor's Introduction.

Abstract

Editor’s Introduction Martha Montello This issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine introduces three new sections for the journal: Personal Perspectives, Review Essays, and Fiction. These new sections exemplify the journal’s commitment to create a unique space for innovative, thought-provoking, and eclectic work at the intersections of medicine, science, and the humanities. Our model in creating these new sections is thoroughly collaborative. The ideas come from authors. We have worked closely with prospective authors to create and define each of the new sections. Our overriding goal with these three venues is to provide scholars, researchers, and readers with new ideas framed in new ways. We hope to encourage creative thinking about the enormous shifts that are taking place in clinical medicine, health policy, and bioscientific research. Speaking across and through disciplines, our authors are exploring new ways of reshaping the goals of medicine and science. The essay format for Perspectives in Biology and Medicine emphasizes the process of exploration. The new Personal Perspectives section offers authors the opportunity to focus more directly on the intersection of the personal with the public or professional in their work than they might in a traditional scholarly essay. Our first essay of this genre is by our Deputy Editor, Frank Miller. “Changing One’s Mind in Bioethics” tells an intriguing story of his own personal transformation over the years as a bioethicist, one with profound implications for the changing field of [End Page 377] bioethics as a whole. We hope that other authors are willing to write about the ways that their own ideas have changed as they have engaged with new developments or challenging critics. We have published essay reviews in the past. With this issue, however, we introduce a new Essay Review section, with Larry Churchill as Editor. Where many journals publish book reviews, our aim in this section is to present essays that synthesize ideas about important new books, articles, films, plays, or cases. We encourage authors to submit review essays that respond to scholarly work that has appeared in any or all of these formats. We only ask that books or clusters of articles are thematically related. We hope our authors will use their essays as an occasion to speak their minds, with descriptions, comments, and analyses of questions and issues they believe deserve broader attention. Larry Churchill leads off the new section with a remarkable new essay of his own, “Conscience and Moral Tyranny.” Essays that attend to two or more books, or two or more articles, are especially welcome. We believe these essays will fill a substantial gap in the scholarship of many fields in biology and medicine, such as genetics, neurobiology, and evolution, as well as bioethics, history, philosophy, medical education, and clinical practice. Essays in the New York Review of Books or Times Literary Supplement provide examples of the approach we seek. Review Essays for Perspectives in Biology and Medicine will be indexed as peer-reviewed, published articles. And finally, for the first time in its history, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine will publish fiction. The new Fiction section recognizes that certain aspects of the truth can be told only through a story. Chris Feudtner’s extraordinary new story, “Second Time,” portrays an experience in a young physician’s life that leaves the reader with a profound understanding that only a well-told story could render. This issue as a whole gathers together essays on an array of topics, from an analysis of the implications of changes in organ donation policy to speculation about what killed Mary Todd Lincoln. We hope you enjoy it. [End Page 378] martha_montello@hms.harvard.edu Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press