The "wider view": André Helleger's passionate, integrating intellect and the creation of bioethics

This article provides an account of how André Hellegers, founder and first Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, laid medicine open to bioethics. Helleger's approach to bioethics, as to morality generally and also to medicine and biomedical science, involved taking the "wider view" -- a value-filled vision that integrated and gave meaning to what otherwise was disparate, precarious, and conflicting. This article shows how Helleger's wider view of bioethics was shaped by events in his own life, his resultant sense of the precariousness of life and health, his commitment to religious inclusiveness, his research in fetal medicine, his clinical experience in obstetrics, his role in the struggle to change the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on fertility control, and his developing concepts of health and disease. Hellegers was committed to and worked toward bioethics as a self-consciously interdisciplinary field in which the contributing disciplines adapt to each other -- rather than sustain themselves as autonomous disciplines -- to create a dynamic and complex intellectual, clinical, and social activity.