The Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics was established by a philosophy professor, Peter Singer, in 1980, as Australia's first research center devoted to bioethics. It is based at Monash's Clayton Campus, located in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, and is part of the Faculty of Arts.

The Centre pursues vigorous research into many aspects of bioethics, and teaches a strong graduate program to a range of health professionals seeking to develop their skills in this area. The Centre has become known for its ground-breaking work in several areas of bioethics and ethical theory, particularly reproductive ethics, end-of-life decision-making, and the development of utilitarian and virtue-based approaches to ethics. The Centre has also pioneered graduate study in bioethics, with its popular Master of Bioethics program taken by students from around the world.

Aims
The Centre has three primary aims:

* To carry out research on issues in human bioethics and to promote study of the ethical, social and legal problems arising out of medical, biological and genetic research;

* To stimulate the development of educational programs in human bioethics for professionals and the public;

* To provide an advisory and resource centre for government, professional, educational, and community groups.

Funding
The Centre's basic funding comes directly from the Australian government. As with most academic units in Australian universities, the Centre's government funding has been increasingly tied to student numbers enrolled in its educational programs, with a small (albeit growing) proportion of funding allocated on the basis of research performance, measured primarily through publications, grants attracted, and PhD supervision. The Centre has supplemented direct government funding by securing grants for specific research projects both from government bodies (such as the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council) and non-government bodies (such as the Myer Foundation).

Personnel
Current personnel at the Centre include: the Director, Justin Oakley (PhD, Philosophy); Lecturers, John McKie (PhD, Philosophy) and David Neil (PhD, Philosophy); Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Helga Kuhse (PhD, Philosophy); and the co-editors of the Centre's quarterly journal Monash Bioethics Review, Deborah Zion (PhD, Bioethics) and Merle Spriggs (PhD, Bioethics). Administrative support is provided by Heather Mahamooth. The Centre's founding Director, Peter Singer, left Monash in mid-1999 to take up a chair in bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values.

Previous academic staff at the Monash Centre include Udo Schuklenk, Lynn Gillam, David McCarthy, Julian Savulescu, Dean Cocking, Stephen Buckle, John Burgess, along with research assistants on various projects. The Centre has attracted many international visitors, research fellows, and exchange students over the years.

Research
The Centre's current research projects include the following:

I am working on the development of a rigorous form of virtue ethics and applying it to certain issues of concern to the health care professions, such as voluntary euthanasia, family caregiving, and notions of professional integrity. This research has resulted in a number of journal articles, and a recently published book (co-authored with Dean Cocking), Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (2001).

John McKie is examining the implications of certain theories of justice and concepts from health economics (such as the Quality-Adjusted Life-Year, or QALY) to the allocation of resources in health care, drawing on his book (co-authored with Jeff Richardson, Peter Singer, and Helga Kuhse), The Allocation of Health Care Resources: An Ethical Evaluation of the `QALY' Approach (1998).

Helga Kuhse has been working on notions of partiality and impartiality in nursing and medical ethics, developing and extending themes from her recent book, Caring: Nurses, Women, and Ethics (1997). Members of the Centre and graduate students are continuing several projects focusing on the concept of autonomy and the nature and value of informed consent, both in clinical practice and biomedical research.

The Centre is also developing research initiatives concerning the ethics of international biomedical research, such as the ethics of clinical trials in developing countries, and justice in the distribution of the benefits and burdens of biotechnological research. These projects build on studies by Deborah Zion, and on Udo Schuklenk's book, Access to Experimental Drugs in Terminal Illness: Ethical Issues (1998).

Over its twenty-one year existence, the Centre has conducted a number of highly successful research projects, with several particularly worthy of note. Peter Singer led a series of studies during the 1980s into the ethics of various new reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (technologies which Professor Carl Wood and other Monash reproductive scientists helped to pioneer). These studies resulted in some of the earliest published work on the ethics of IVF, such as The Reproduction Revolution (1984)--published in the US as Making Babies--, which Singer co-authored with Deane Wells.

Helga Kuhse joined the Centre in 1981, and worked with Singer on an innovative study into the ethics of withholding treatment from infants born with severe disabilities, culminating in the jointly authored book, Should the Baby Live? (1985).

These projects drew on the Centre's extensive empirical research into the attitudes of health professionals and the community toward the practices in question. Notable publications emerging from the Centre's empirical research during the 1990s include a study of physicians' and nurses' views on voluntary euthanasia and other end-of-life decisions, and a study of partialist and impartialist approaches to ethical reasoning by health professionals.

During his time at the Centre for Human Bioethics, Singer also produced some of the most widely-used textbooks and anthologies in applied ethics and ethical theory, including Practical Ethics (2nd ed. 1993), Applied Ethics (1986), A Companion to Ethics (1991), Ethics (Oxford Readers Series, 1994), A Companion to Bioethics (1998, co-edited with Helga Kuhse), and Bioethics: An Anthology (1999, co-edited with Helga Kuhse). Many of these and other works from the Centre have been translated into a number of foreign languages.

Singer and Kuhse also created the well-respected quarterly journal Bioethics, in 1987, and founded the International Association of Bioethics, whose governing body includes many representatives from developing as well as developed countries.

Other features
The Centre has become known for its practical and non-sectarian approach to ethical issues. Singer and Kuhse, in particular, have been trenchant critics of a reliance on sanctity-of-human-life views by health professionals and lawmakers in justifying medical decisions at the beginning and end of life. Members of the Centre have also done much consultancy work for various government bodies, and played an influential role in public debate and law reform in many areas, including legislation governing assisted reproduction, surrogate motherhood, and end-of-life decision-making. This engagement with public policy and issues of community concern in Australia has helped the Centre gain strong support both within and outside the academy.

The Centre's activities are also publicized through its quarterly journal, Monash Bioethics Review, Australia's only peer-reviewed bioethics journal. It contains much work by and for Australians. Monash Bioethics Review is the successor to the Bioethics News, begun by Helga Kuhse in 1981.

The Centre developed one of the first Master of Bioethics programs, in 1989, and pioneered distance education study in bioethics. The Centre's teaching programs have focused primarily on health professionals returning to university to do graduate study, more than on medical students (medicine in Australia is usually an undergraduate course), although there has been considerable involvement with the latter also.

The interaction with several hundred experienced health professionals over the years has enriched the Centre's research, and has highlighted the ethical issues of significant concern to members of the health professions. The Centre's students and members of its steering committee played a leading role in the establishment of the Australian Bioethics Association, which holds an annual conference. Each year since the mid-1980s, the Centre has run a week-long Intensive Bioethics Course, dealing with ethical issues in human research and clinical practice of direct concern to health professionals. Many applicants for the Centre's educational programs first hear about these courses through colleagues who are enrolled in them.

Future directions
Work on several research projects has just commenced, and will continue for several years. One study is investigating issues about potentiality raised by human reproductive cloning and stem cell research. Another new study deals with informed consent, physician report cards, and professional accountability. There are also plans to examine the idea, invoked in several influential court decisions, that procreative decisions have an intimacy that warrants special protection by the state.

The Centre will extend its already substantial involvement in the new inter-faculty professional ethics subject (course) Ethics at Work, which is available to all Monash second-year undergraduates. Students taking this subject choose three out of the eight modules available (which include modules in health care ethics, and science and research ethics). The subject makes constructive use of on-line teaching as well as traditional face-to-face teaching. The Centre also plans to expand the subjects available in its Master of Bioethics program, and is developing new teaching programs focusing specifically on ethics and biotechnology.