Contemporary Issues in Biomedical Ethics

601 macromolecular species, a definition of the properties of the relevant cell receptors, and evaluation of specific membrane alterations, are several of the topics which were considered. Various new methodologies and approaches were detailed, and significant contributions to the channelling of scientific thought were made by various authorities in the field. The contribution from Paul Greengard's laboratory deserves special mention for it describes the kind of thinking and experimental approach responsible for signal advances. The reader becomes instantly aware of both the problems and the progress in the field. Surely, such a gathering had the potential of generating rewarding discussion among the participants, for it is along the fringes of traditional lines of inquiry that signal advances are made and this has become once more abundantly clear in the proceedings of this meeting. The question may be raised, however, and perhaps remain unanswered: What exactly does the recording of such a symposium offer? To the educated scientific reader, a well-researched review article certainly presents a fully up-to-date survey of the general area. To the researcher intimately involved with the field, the usefulness of this book might be severely limited, for the papers are of very uneven quality and the volume generally suffers, with conspicuous exceptions, from many unfortunate editorial mistakes and textual ambiguities. In addition, both delayed publication, which made many of the contributions outdated because of prior publication in the experimental literature, and a high cost of $22 make the reviewer hesitate to recommend this volume. Bioethics is a hot topic these days. Rapidly expanding technology has generated new moral dilemmas as well as new therapies. There exists a striking lack of consensus among doctors, philosophers, lawyers, and health consumers on such important questions as euthanasia, abortion, the rights of patients, and the role of physicians. But there is no lack of books and articles on the subject. Most of these volumes, however, consist of compendia of articles considered "classic" in the field, and the degree of overlap and the dearth of originality among them is disheartening. Against this background, the value of the present volume is twofold: these are original papers, published here for the first time, and some of these papers are very good indeed. Two deserve special mention. John Ladd's "Legalism and Medical Ethics," which opens the volume, is a sensitive analysis of the conflict between the ethical and jurisprudential approaches to bioethics. Ladd argues that …