Are All Those Novels About Bioethics Any Good?

Wondering what to take to the beach this summer? Just in time to help you make your selection, the Hastings Center, a nonprofit bioethics research institute, is releasing the July-August issue of its journal with four essays on how bioethical issues are confronted through literature.

The name that probably comes first to most people’s mind is Jodi Picoult, author of numerous best sellers on children, middle-class families, and how they confront issues raised by biotechnology and modern medicine. Critics have often charged Picoult’s books are mindless airplane reading. Fair? Somewhat, says Martha Montello, an associate professor of history and philosophy of medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

Without doubt, she writes, Picoult’s novels would be improved if cut in half. But at her best—like My Sister’s Keeper, a novel and now film about parents who conceive one child to be a genetic match for another—the author helps us navigate the moral conflicts of today’s medical culture. Still, “Jodi Picoult’s peculiar failing is that she promises more and then fails to deliver. She raises compelling questions, then drives them toward resolution via a throat-grabbing plot, but in the end either doesn’t know how to begin to answer them or refuses to,” Montello goes on. “We need fiction writers who will take on the tough questions.”

And who might those be?

Nancy Berlinger, a research scholar at The Hastings Center and an adjunct lecturer in health-care ethics at Yale School of Nursing, reaches back on the bookshelf to nominate Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne.

What makes them so good? Both look at the medical profession as it was emerging in the 19th century and ask whether the medical quandaries doctors faced then are the same as today. (Yes, they were worried about getting paid; no, boutique medicine is not new.) And, of course, the books are works of literature, not just best sellers.

The two other essays in the review delve into the ethics of scientific research and what has happened to those stories of patients confronting great odds – and overcoming them. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—the nonfiction account of the woman whose cervical cancer gave rise to a cell line that has been important in medical research, by Rebecca Skloot—brought tears to the eyes of John D. Lantos. And he was compelled by the complexity of Richard Powers’ novel Generosity. “Both books—the true story and the novel—are about unassuming innocents who fall into the clutches of biomedical researchers, yet weave in science as the redemption story of our age,” says Lantos, who directs the Children’s Mercy Hospital Bioethics Center in Kansas City and is a visiting professor of neonatology at The University of Chicago.

Bruce Jennings, director of bioethics at the Center for Humans and Nature in New York and editor of the electronic journal Minding Nature, is interested in how books like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go challenge the age-old “liberationist romance” that described the individual overcoming great medical odds.

So take your pick. “Wrestling with these kinds of questions from the safety of an armchair may be a vital part of the development of our societal debate on them,” writes Joyce A. Griffin, managing editor of The Hastings Center Report.—Karen Winkler