Summary

Ending and Extending Life takes a detailed look at several bold medical innovations that have saved and improved the lives of millions of patients. Mechanical ventilation, organ transplantation and other life-saving surgical techniques, new diagnostic technologies (such as CT and MRI scans), advanced chemotherapy and antiviral drugs, and tube feeding are only a few of the many medical enhancements that have had exciting and complex implications for patients, loved ones, and health care practitioners.

Medical innovation, of course, requires research, and research depends on patients and healthy volunteers willing to assume risks. This new book considers the ethical decisions that medical researchers have to face on the path to discovery, using real patients' stories to highlight key ethical principles and their application to the everyday practice of medicine.

Specifications

Black-and-white photographs and line illustrations. Index. Glossary. Chronology. Print and Web resources. Tables and charts.

About the Author(s)

Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald has published extensively in the fields of biomedical ethics, environmental policy, and nuclear security. With a degree in physics from Swarthmore College and graduate studies in history of science at MIT, she has served as staff writer for President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, as an analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council's International Nuclear Program, and as an environmental consultant for the Union of Concerned Scientists.