Field Notes

Abstract

Field Notes Thomas H. Murray, President Jolly good Fellows. Groucho Marx wrote a letter of resignation to the Friars Club of Beverly Hills in which he explained, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." A similar logic accounts for the early evolution of The Hastings Center. In the beginning were the founders, Dan Callahan and Will Gaylin, and the Fellows—a group of brilliant, intellectually adventurous scholars and professionals in philosophy, theology, medicine, law, the life sciences, and the social sciences. Dan and Will had two fundamental insights: first, that advances in medicine and the life sciences would create fascinating and difficult ethical challenges, and second, that no one discipline or profession could achieve a comprehensive understanding of those challenges. Instead, they needed somehow to share and integrate their respective insights. Accordingly, the founders recruited the first set of Fellows from among the leading thinkers of the day and set them to work on a variety of questions. The Fellows, of course, had day jobs elsewhere. It quickly became clear that The Hastings Center needed a dedicated research staff who would work exclusively at and for the Center. The original idea was that the Center's professional staff would act as handmaidens ("facilitators" is a nicer term) for the Fellows, who would provide the intellectual firepower. Here's where Groucho comes in: The Center wouldn't hire anyone who wasn't awfully smart and interesting, but anyone who met that description wouldn't want to be a handmaiden, even to a distinguished group like the Fellows. So, soon enough, the researchers who worked at the Center began to set the agenda and to provide intellectual leadership. This created an occasionally awkward relationship with the Fellows, who felt—not without cause—that their authority was being usurped by young whippersnappers. And so it has been, until now. The Fellowship has grown to 167 members. Becoming a Hastings Center Fellow remains a great honor—the confidential process requires nomination by a committee of Fellows, approval by the Center's board of directors, and "a distinguished contribution to the fields in which the Center is engaged." The current roster of Fellows (available on the Center's Web site) lives up to that lofty standard. Hastings Center Fellows continue to be involved in the Center's research projects and to publish in the Hastings Center Report, IRB: Ethics & Human Research, and other prestigious journals. At the 2007 annual Fellows meeting, we proposed a new role for the Fellows in our Public Interest Initiative. One way the initiative strives to enhance public understanding and public policy on ethical issues in medicine and the life sciences is to connect our target audiences—policy-makers, journalists, and opinion leaders—to the most thoughtful and knowledgeable experts. No surprise: the Center's Fellows comprise the deepest pool of such experts. So we asked them to help us identify those experts for each of a broad range of issues, and to work with the Center to connect with the initiative's target audiences. The wonderful insights that the founding Fellows created deserved a vastly larger audience than they could command at the time. The Hastings Center is committed to ensuring that the collective wisdom of today's Fellows gets the attention it deserves. [End Page c2] Copyright © 2007 The Hastings Center