I am honored to accept this award named for Henry Knowles Beecher, whose courageous research helped to launch bioethics, and especially to receive it from The Hastings Center. I remember my sense of discovery and elation on taking part in one of the Center's first meetings, in 1971, and realizing that here was a group of people from many fields working on practical moral problems that I cared about deeply, yet had never had a chance to debate in so broad-gauged and stimulating a context. Daniel Callahan has asked me to speak about my studies and my work in theoretical and practical ethics; and in bioethics, which has been central to that work from the outset. Not only do all questions of moral choice that human beings face arise in the context of medicine, they do so with special urgency. Medicine provides a magnifying mirror held up to human interaction in all its complexity. When people are helped or hurt by medical care or through research, dealt with fairly by health professionals or exploited, lied to or told the truth, this often matters to them more than at times when they have less at stake and are less vulnerable. As a seventeen-year-old, I had no thought of addressing such issues when, in 1953, I was preparing to enter the Sorbonne University in Paris. I was auditing courses in Sanskrit, literature, and philosophy, and hoping to study toward a degree in philosophy. Mlle. Jeanne Hersch, a brilliant teacher at the International School in Geneva, from which I had just graduated, had made this field come alive for me; while she taught textual analysis and French composition with passion and utmost rigor, she was also translating books by her teacher Karl jaspers into French. I was struck by one of these books--an introduction to philosophy that had originated as a set of radio lectures for the general public.[1] It seemed to speak directly to my questions about how to begin studies in this field. In an appendix to his book, jaspers offers luminously annotated reading lists for students aiming to immerse themselves in a systematic study of philosophy. Such a study, he suggests, must include efforts to move along three paths: participation in scientific research, broadly viewed as rooted in both the physical and the moral sciences; study of the great philosophers in the Occidental, Indian, and Chinese traditions; and serious attention to questions of conscience in daily life, beginning with How shall I live? But students would leave out something essential, jaspers adds, if they did not also allow themselves to be seized by the high works of religion, poetry, and art. What matters is not to read always for the greatest possible variety, but to attach oneself to what is great and to plunge back into it constantly A few rare works of philosophy [such as those of Plato and Kant] contain thought as infinite as the great masterworks of art. /.../ One single great thinker suffices to allow us to attain the entire domain of philosophy. In penetrating deeply into the work of a lifetime, one finds oneself at a center that illuminates all the rest and toward which the light flows back. (pp. 229, 231) Such an approach to the study of philosophy, at once inclusive and focused, seemed as persuasive to me then as it does today. But when I broached my plans to my mother, she was not convinced that I was making the right choice, nor was my father. My parents, Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal, both of whom had devoted themselves, at different times in their lives, to scholarship, public service, politics, and writing, pointed out that my proposed course of study might prepare me poorly for putting my education to creative practical use. Why, they asked, should I not rather take up anthropology, following in the path of Margaret Mead and others whom they knew? Or, as my father had long hoped, his own field of economics? …