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Master of Science (SM) in Bioethics I. Background and Overview of Program Bioethics, most broadly, may be understood as a field of ethical inquiry in the life sciences. Over the past 50 years, the field of bioethics has undergone rapid growth as science and technology have expanded the limits of the possible. Advances in life-prolonging and sustaining technologies in the 1960s, in particular, were central in the emergence of medical ethics, a subset of bioethics, as physicians (and more generally the institution of medicine) were forced to address the scientific, social, moral, and even political implications of advances in science that began to translate into the ability to change the fundamental landscape of life and death. Framed in the context of the doctor-patient relationship, decisions about these early applications of science to bedside medicine gave rise to what became the rapidly growing field of medical ethics. As science and technology continued to advance, the intersection of moral inquiry and life sciences also expanded, leading to the emergence of critical questions beyond the context of the doctor-patient relationship to a broader ethical landscape reflecting the central moral challenges and tensions created by scientific discovery and the possibility of greater intervention in the creation of, conditions of, and limits of life on a societal scale. These challenges, while deeply rooted in and informed by medicine, are no longer squarely limited to medical ethics, but are part of medical, scientific, philosophical, social, and even political inquiry; and ethical issues related to emerging technologies often hinge on some of the deepest questions about the meaning of human life and our concepts of dignity and respect. As such, bioethics has emerged as both an academic and practical enterprise. Expertise in bioethics requires both a rigorous foundation in philosophical inquiry and theory and careful study about how to engage actual challenges affecting both individuals and society. In choosing the term “bioethics” rather than “medical ethics” for this 36-credit master’s degree program at HMS, the program consciously acknowledges that many of the most challenging issues in medicine today occur away from the bedside. For example, population-based ethics explicitly requires an analysis of what is best for populations rather than for individual patients and an articulation of the tensions between these views. Similarly, challenges in contemporary research ethics require a balancing of the risks to individuals against the potential benefit to future patients and populations. The Center for Bioethics (the Center) offers the HMS Master of Science in Bioethics program (SM in Bioethics), the MBE program, the mission of which is to provide a comprehensive curriculum in bioethics to individuals with careers in other primary disciplines in order to enable them to translate their expertise into specialized focus on contemporary challenges in bioethics. The MBE program fulfills this purpose by providing every student with a rigorous foundation in all aspects of bioethics – theoretical and applied – and the tools to engage in an important issue in the field relevant to the individual student’s career goals through a year-long