They Came Around...to Giving a Contract to Georgetown's Kennedy Institute

Not the minimally conscious people who are all over the headlines this past week - no, the big news about awakenings is from the people at the National Library of Medicine, who have finally agreed to carry their weight on the project of building the Kennedy Institute's famous National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. The NLM has just bestowed an $8 million contract on KI, whose library - the product in part of the field's brilliant bibliographer, Christian ethicist LeRoy Walters - has defined bioethics literature since the genesis of the field. Anyone who knows anything about the field is on a first name basis with Doris Goldstein, M.L.S., M.A., and her large and brilliant staff at the NRCBL - they stalk you at the ASBH meeting to confirm the citation for your weirdest articles so that everything that is written in bioethics is in the library. And they then help anyone find anything in bioethics. And they are all as resourceful as they have to be to keep track of a field this strange.

So anyway this big cash infusion means we have at least another decade of 1-800-MED-ETHX to look forward to - and hopefully that KI and the NRCBL will be in a position to do even more amazing things!