Abstract

When I arrived at Harvard as an incoming graduate student in the fall of 1964, I soon received a telephone call from a gentleman who introduced himself as Henry Beecher. I was in the process of shifting my graduate studies from research neuropharmacology to the study of ethics. Robert Featherstone, the head of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco, where I had been studying, was a specialist in anesthesiology and knew Henry Beecher, who was also working in anesthesiology, well. He had contacted Beecher, alerting him to the fact that a new graduate student was arriving and that it appeared that the two of us had much in common. The phone call from Beecher...