Moral Histories [Legacy and Impact: A Project to Preserve the Founding Stories of Bioethics and Connect the Public with Bioethics]

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics is recording and preserving the oral histories of the scholars who created the modern field of bioethics, and now wants to expand that archive beyond the United States. The problem is that bioethics—the discipline that guides decisions on everything from organ transplants to gene editing—has a recorded history that is overwhelmingly American and incomplete. The existing Moral Histories collection holds 96 hours of interviews with 15 US scholars, with interviews from 20 more Americans due by mid-2025. But the field grew globally, and the voices of influential non-US founders are missing from the public record. Without them, the archive tells a partial story of how bioethical thinking developed. If this project succeeds, the archive will become a genuinely international resource. Journalists, scholars, and the public will be able to trace how ethical frameworks for medicine and research emerged in different countries and cultures. The collection is freely accessible online, so anyone—from a patient advocate to a policymaker—can hear the founding conversations in the founders’ own words. This is primarily a preservation and public engagement project, not one with immediate practical applications, but a richer historical record could inform how future ethical debates are framed.