Bioethics is now taken seriously. Is there a danger of its being taken in or taken over? Might it be influenced in other ways, less visible and less easily avoided? As private corporations and bioethicists build relationships with each other, bioethicists must ask themselves about the opportunities, the constraints, and the subtle shifts in attitude and focus that such ties might create. Last fall sat in on a conference session about corporate funding of bioethics at the annual meeting of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities in Salt Lake City. The issue up for discussion was whether bioethicists might legitimately accept money from the bodies whose actions and policies they were commenting upon in their teaching, writing, consulting, and policymaking. Many people in the room seemed enthusiastic about the prospect. Here is a way for bioethics to make a real difference in the world, it was said. Here is a way to have an impact. We all get our money from somewhere--universities, grants, hospitals, managed care organizations. Few of us are so unsophisticated that we would allow money to corrupt our moral judgment. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations need bioethicists. They are aching for moral guidance. So deep are their moral and spiritual needs that they are willing to give ethicists gifts, contracts, honoraria, consultation fees, and stock options. thought about this argument as traveled from Salt Lake City to a funeral in South Carolina. Driving down through the Lowcountry to the funeral home, found myself sitting in traffic behind a pickup with two stickers on the back. One said: I give to the South Carolina Sheriff's Association. Another one said, Support your state trooper. remember these stickers from when was growing up. You got them in return for a donation. You put the stickers on your car in the hope that if you were stopped for speeding or drunk driving or some other violation, you would get special treatment from the police. Did the stickers work? don't know. South Carolinians are not as sophisticated as bioethicists. As long as the police were selling the stickers, we figured they were worth the donation. Bioethicists are not police officers, and a donation is not a bribe. Nor are consultation fees, honoraria, annual gifts, seats on corporate boards, and trips to exotic locations. Bribery, according to the conventional definition, is giving a person money in order that she will violate the duties that go along with her position. It is easy to see what that means when you want to buy a judge or a police officer. But what does it mean to buy a bioethicist? Most of us who teach and write about ethics have a fair degree of academic freedom. We can make any argument we want, teach the texts we want, write on any topic that interests us, vote the way we wish on IRBs, try to influence policy in any way we see fit. We are bound by our consciences, of course, but like the beetle in Wittgenstein's box, there is no independent way of verifying what our consciences tell us to do. If we are influenced by the money we take, how would anyone know? How would we ourselves know? Paid Apologists Last year helped put together an issue of this journal called Alienation, and the Self. Some of the papers in that issue were critical of the way Prozac is prescribed and marketed. Shortly after that issue was published, Eli Lilly, which manufactures Prozac, withdrew its annual contribution to the Hastings Center. Lilly was the Hastings Center's largest annual corporate donor. Some people have seen this episode as confirmation of their worst suspicions about industry funding. These are the people who think that every gift comes with strings attached, and that those strings lead directly back to corporate headquarters. For others, the Lilly episode showed just the opposite: that corporate pressure cannot influence good people. The editors of the Report seemed as surprised by Lilly's move as was, and there was never any hint that a corporate donor might influence what they published. …