Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2024
ISSN
0098-8588
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Language
en-US
Abstract
The celebration of the anniversary of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights (the “Center”) provides an opportunity to reflect on what defines the field of health law, as well as its conjoined twins of bioethics and human rights. The related fields are vast, and the subjects they encompass are ever-expanding. It is probably impossible to lay out a summary that does justice to their expansive, interdisciplinary scope. Instead, my discussion of the Center examines a subject that barely existed when the Center was formed in 19581 and that continues to make headlines more than sixty–six years later — organ transplantation. Transplantation is useful as an illustration of the joint fields of health law, bioethics, and human rights. It is a field that grew with us from infancy to maturity during the time of the Center’s growth and that illustrates how several related disciplines — most notably law and medical sciences — are essential to the development of organ transplantation. Additionally, organ transplantation and experiments involving organ transplantation have produced some of the most spectacular cases of human experimentation. Because of both the novelty and human drama these experiments involve, I will use some of them as examples of the pivotal health law and bioethics work the Center engages in. These examples, and others that will be touched on, lead me to conclude that there is no field that matches the life and death drama of health law, especially in the human organ transplantation field. This selective history of health law at the Center, including the definition of death and the limits of surrogate consent, suggest that the legal and bioethical issues brought to us by innovative organ transplantation surgery are unlikely to be exhausted any time soon.
Recommended Citation
George J. Annas,
Transplantation and Immortality: A Selective History of Boston University’s Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights
,
50
American Journal of Law & Medicine
168
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4037
