The Center for Bioethics

The Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics’ mission is to ensure that values and ethics are always part of medical training, laboratory and clinical research, and professional education. The Center brings together the rich intellectual resources of the medical school faculty with health professionals and scientists from our affiliated teaching hospitals, departments across Harvard, and colleagues from other institutions worldwide to ensure that scientific progress, medical therapeutics, and health care practices proceed hand-in-hand with reflection about the profound moral questions raised by advances in the life sciences.

The Center is designed as a platform for integrating ethics and scientific discovery more closely than ever before, generating new forms of collaboration among students, bench scientists, clinical researchers, clinicians, practicing bioethicists, academic philosophers, historians of medicine, humanities scholars and others able to bring their disciplinary perspectives to bear on the ethical challenges posed by present and future biomedical advances.

Aims of the Center:
  • Teach ethics to medical students across the 4-year curriculum
  • Support and strengthen the ethics programs at HMS teaching hospitals and affiliated facilities
  • Prepare the next generation of practitioners and leaders in bioethics
  • Address contemporary ethical issues in the biosciences and health care
  • Engage the public in understanding and addressing ethical aspects of health care and new biotechnologies
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