Shout Out to 2005 Sponsors

If you've read any from among a dozen virtually identical screeds in the past year, you know that bioethics is now an unethical, wholly-owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry, and bioethicists now a troupe of touring show dogs in the guise of watchdogs. Your editors, moreover, are apparently beholden to pharma and biotech and in need of a twelve-step program. And we're rank sinners too.

So naturally we want to close out the blog this year by giving props to those who returned the Ring to Smeagol ("Gollum, Gollum") made financial contributions to the blog this year. Thanks go to PBS, to WGBH Boston, to MSNBC Keith Olbermann, to Basic Books as publisher of The Republican War on Science, to Scholargy publishing as publisher of Explaining Postmodernism, to the 48er bookstore, to GoToMeeting, to MyCustomTailor.com - because when the evil pharma money people reporters show up to film your comments about Hwang Woo-suk, you don't want to be caught in an off the rack suit. And finally to these guys and their odd-looking book about religion. All told, blogads generated just under $500 in support in 2005 all of which we plowed right back into coffee support for the students who help the editorial staff at Alden March Bioethics Institute, subject to the institute's policies and procedures.

We do have one sponsor who actually invested real money in this thing. In the immortal words of Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers of Car Talk, "though they probably wince every time we say it," the blog was built with a major grant from The Greenwall Foundation, whose programs in research and education have supported bioethics for almost 15 years.