Daniel Callahan

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Daniel John Callahan (July 19, 1930 – July 16, 2019) was an American philosopher who pioneered the field of bioethical ethics as co-founder of The Hastings Center, the world's first bioethics research center.

He served as the director of The Hastings Center from 1969 to 1983, president from 1984 to 1996, and president emeritus from 1996 to 2019.

He was either the author or editor of 47 books.

Personal life

Callahan married Sidney DeShazo in 1954. They had six children, five boys, and one girl, as well as writer and editor David Callahan and film maker Peter Callahan.

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Life and career

Daniel Callahan was born in Washington, D.C., on July 19, 1930.

Callahan was a swimmer and wanted to attend Yale University because of the university's competitive swimming program. He was attracted to interdisciplinary studies and graduated in 1952 with a double degree in English and Philosophy. He was awarded the M.A. A degree from Georgetown University in 1956 and a doctor of philosophy from Harvard in 1965.

Callahan served as executive editor of Commonweal, a Catholic journal of opinion, from 1961 to 1968. During this period, Callahan became a well-known writer and author in Catholic intellectual circles, marking a tumultuous period for the Catholic Church. In addition to numerous articles in Commonweal, he wrote or edited nine books, including The Mind of the Catholic Layman, Honesty in the Church, and The Catholic Case for Contraception. Callahan was once described as "perhaps the most influential Catholic layman of the 1960s," historian Rodger Van Allen said.

Callahan left the Catholic Church in the late 1960s, later identifying his disenchantment in the book As a child, he became interested in the intersection of medicine and ethics. Callahan travelled around the globe to explore how different nations approached the issue of abortion, as well as ethical issues surrounding family planning and population control, with support from the Population Council and the Ford Foundation. The result, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality, was the groundbreaking 1970 book. Callahan will remain active in debates over abortion for years to come, and he has been frequently interviewed by journalists on this topic. He referred to himself as "51% pro-choice." Sidney Callahan, a prohibitionist, co-edited a book called Abortion: Understanding Differences, which featured essays from people from all sides of the controversy in 1984. The couple's long-standing disagreements on abortion were once the subject of a PBS article, and they became involved in a number of public debates on abortion, including on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.

Callahan founded the Hastings Center in 1969 with Willard Gaylin, a noted psychiatrist. The center, which was originally called the Institute for Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, and was based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, was the world's first research group devoted to bioethics. It played a pioneering role in the field of education by bringing together scholars from various disciplines, including medicine, law, science, and philosophy. Arthur Caplan and Robert M. Veatch, two well-known bioethics researchers, all began their careers at the Hastings Center. Callahan served as the center's director from the beginning to September 1, 1996. During that time, he wrote numerous articles and edited multiple books, including on topics of death and dying and genetics.

Callahan wrote Setting Limits: Medical Aspirations in an Aging Society in 1987, a book that argued that U.S. society could reduce expensive healthcare for those very elderly Americans who were unlikely to live long or healthy lives. He argued that the financial burden was too high, and that it came at a time when urgent needs such as education were rising. He also suggested a "age-based framework for the termination of life-extending therapy" in his book. "This is a pivotal work that raises difficult questions and inspires provocative responses," The New York Times Book Review said upon its publication. Limits set to be the spruce of future moral, medical, and policy discussions of aging. The book attracted a lot of attention and sparked a lot of controversy, with two volumes of essays debating or criticizing Callahan's theories. Callahan was interviewed by NPR in 2009 about his responsibilities on Setting Limits as he aged and responded to allegations of hypocrisy for profiting from expensive medical services.

Callahan followed up on Setting Limits with a collection of books on health care, aging, electronics, and mortality. According to False Hopes (Simon & Schuster, 1990), What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress (Simon & Schuster, 1990), The Struggle of a Peaceful Death (Simon & Schuster, 1993), Human beings are and should be a burden to each other, as well as humans; What Price Better Health (Simon & Schuster, 1998). Hazards of the Research Imperative (University of California Press, 2003); Medicine and the Market: Equity vs. vice versa. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and Taming the Beloved Beast: Why Medical Technology Is Destroying Our Health Care System (Princeton University Press, August 2009).

During this period in both the United States and Europe, Callahan lectured extensively on his health-care ideas.

Callahan, a founding member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences; a member of the Director's Advisory Committee, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Advisory Council, Department of Health and Human Services; and the Chair of Scientific Responsibility, Department of Health and Human Services. In 1996, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Freedom and Scientific Responsibility Award was given to him. He was given the 2008 Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He testified in Congress on stem cell research and other topics.

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