American Journal of Bioethics

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View image Each year about this time I find myself doing two things with my peers. Both result in depressing outcomes. First, I ask how many are planning to attend our field's only national meeting in bioethics per se, the annual conference of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities . This year, I figured this would be a home run. The rooms are relatively inexpensive, the program is great, and the meeting is being held in San Diego, California. Who doesn't want to go to San Diego in late October -- particularly by comparison to some recent choice cities for the meeting? The ASBH meeting is, I intone annually, the only occasion at which you can meet and exchange in serious discussion with the people in basically the entire field of bioethics, at which you can learn about all of the educational programs and journals and websites and recent books in the field - and talk to the authors and editors and graduate studies directors. It is the single place where graduate students in the field gather in any numbers (more on that later) and it is the best place to find collaborators for, e.g., research projects, ethics committee or consultation consortia members, conferences, or for that matter just to make new acquaintances and see friends whom you've never laid eyes on before. And every year I get the same replies: "when is that again?"; "I've never been before, I'm not really a bioethicist"; "it's too expensive"; "I have to do another conference that month"...or my least favorite, "I'm not really part of that crowd." Some years ago now, when I was on the board of directors ASBH, Paul Root Wolpe as incoming president delivered his address on the state of the society, and a manifesto: the Society should have 3,000 members by [date x]. I was somehow linked to this effort, and whatever it is I was supposed to do, I did poorly I'm sure. But his goal was, he argued at the outset, accomplishable. And you should be shocked that there are only 3,000 members of the professional society of what is decidedly among the fastest growing areas of academic concern in the world. Shocked because people on ethics committees do not think it necessary or even a desirable "extra" to be a member or participant in the meeting of ASBH, and they constitute tens of thousands of people. Shocked because the 1,500 or so members (if that) of ASBH (by my last estimation) represent a fraction of the academics who do bioethics full-time in their teaching if not research. Shocked because scientists and policymakers and industry leaders and consumer and patient advocates don't think it necessary to join. Ok maybe not shocked. But I hope it bothers you, because what it represents is the inability of our band of members to propagate such that there are lots of others out there who see issues in ASBH as issues for bioethics in general, and because the failure of ASBH to thrive at the level of other professional societies in comparably sized disciplines is incredible when juxtaposed to the readership of bioethics' websites and journals and the countless articles about bioethics in the top journals of medicine and science.

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