This dissertation research project will examine how contemporary academic bioethics in the U.S. balances the aspiration to guide biomedical research and practice with the need to become an institutionally legitimate force in society. Since its inception three decades ago, to what extent has bioethics made biomedicine more socially accountable? At the same time, to what extent has bioethics been made into a public-relations tool for academic and corporate biomedicine? This project will investigate the co-production of the legitimacy and intellectual content of the academic field of bioethics by examining theactivities of bioethicists in three professional arenas: the establishment and furtherance of an academic bioethics unit, the testimony of expert bioethics witnesses in the judicial forum, and the deliberations and recommendations of a federal bioethics commission. Bioethicists' efforts to legitimize their field are viewed as competition and collaboration with other professionals to stake out an emblematic expertise, which is then tendered to various societal clients. A case study of an academic bioethics unit will be conducted to reveal how the unit's efforts to secure material resources and organizational legitimacy shapes the center's intellectual output, drawing on the unit's archival documents and interviews with the unit's director, faculty, staff, and graduate students. Discourse analysis will be used to explore how bioethicists and other professionals seek to legitimize and circumscribe their respective expertise, making use of courtroom proceedings in bioethics cases and the proceedings of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission related to the human stem cell research debate. The proposed research on the social aspects of the intellectual and organizational basis of recent bioethics shifts attention in the budding sociology of bioethics from clinical to academic bioethics, and highlights the institutional and power relationships between bioethics and public policy. This study will also contribute to the fields of higher education studies and science and technology studies, where ethics, and the relationship between legitimacy and knowledge content, have not been sufficiently explored. The findings of this project will provide useful insight into the challenges and opportunities bioethicists face in cultivating socially responsible biomedical science and technology.
