From a Far Eastern Study Room.

At the 51st WMA General Assembly, held in Tel Aviv, Israel, in autumn 1999, the World Medical Association (WMA) decided to develop “basic medical ethics education materials” for the use of those involved in the healthcare field, such as physicians, nurses, and medical students. With the WMA Secretariat’s Ethics Unit playing a central role and taking charge in this endeavor, Dr. John R. Williams in charge of ethics at the Canadian Medical Association’s was requested to take on the position of director of the WMA’s Ethics Unit. Dr. Williams comprehensively reviewed all of the WMA’s past policy documents to draft “basic ethics education materials” using this knowledge as background. In 2005, the fruits of these efforts were published by the WMA as the “WMA Medical Ethics Manual.” Although the original language is English, this manual has been translated into many other languages such as French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, various Eastern European languages, and Russian. The manual, including the 2010 and 2015 revised versions, is being used on a global scale. However, the achievements of Dr. Williams (or “John-san,” as we call him) did not stop there. From around the time that Dr. Otmar Kloiber was appointed to the position of WMA Secretary General in 2004, as director of the WMA’s Ethics Unit and as an ethicist from Canada —a country that has two official languages, English and French—Dr. Williams fully demonstrated his exceptional writing abilities, making a tremendous contribution to the preparation and adoption of WMA declaration and resolution documents (in English) by committees, the councils, and the general assemblies. Incidentally, during committee discussions there were frequent conflicts between “Queen’s English” speaking countries and “American English” speaking countries over expressions. In such situations, it was perhaps John-san who first showed that it was possible to create English-language documents that could harmonize the two. Dr. Williams was succeeded by Dr. Jeff Blackmer of the Canadian Medical Association, who served as director until the spring of 2016. They both played a very important role, and it is desirable that in future Canada continues with this tradition. John-san was also appointed as facilitator for the working group to begin the work of the revision of the Edinburgh (2000) revision of the Declaration of Helsinki (DoH) that was decided at the WMA Council Session held in Berlin in April 2007, and he played a leading role in the revision process. As an advisor to the Medical Ethics and Socio-Medical Affairs Committees, the author attended the expert meetings held by the WMA working group in locations such as Sao Paulo, Divonne-les-Bains, and Helsinki. These expert meetings brought together worldfamous controversialists, such as Dr. Robert Temple of the FDA, and as facilitator, John-san formed a tag-team with WMA Secretary General Dr. Otmar Kloiber with close cooperation of WMA Chair of Council Dr. John Edward Hill, formulating the draft for the DoH Seoul revision, including the declaration structure and text, and guiding it towards its adoption in October 2008. Looking back again at the process that took place at that time, WMA Council Chair Dr. Hill can be regarded as having had an enormous presence. Dr. Hill introduced to the WMA a system for expediting proceedings and decisionmaking called the “Consent Calendar” method. This system enables important points to be dis-