John Fletcher

John Fletcher

John C. Fletcher joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1987 as Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine.

From 1977 to 1987 Dr. Fletcher was the first Chief of the Bioethics Program, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health (NIH).

He received a B.A. (optime merens) in English Literature from the University of the South in 1953 and a Master of Divinity degree (cum laude) from the Virginia Theological Seminary in 1956. He was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Heidelberg from 1956 to 1957. There he translated Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall into English (1957). He completed a Ph.D. degree in Civil Laws from the University of the South.

From 1966-68, his dissertation research at the NIH’s Clinical Center, "A Study of the Ethics of Medical Research" (1969), included a descriptive study of ethical problems of informed consent in clinical research. In 1970, Dr. Fletcher conducted the first field study of ethical problems of parents in prenatal diagnosis and genetic counseling at George Washington University.

He was founding Fellow of the Hastings Center in 1969 and a Senior Fellow of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics from 1974-1984.

With Dorothy C. Wertz, he conducted an international study in 1985-86 of medical geneticists in 19 nations and their approaches to ethical problems in screening, counseling, and prenatal diagnosis, leading to a co-edited book: Ethics and Human Genetics: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Spring-Verlag, 1989). A new study of geneticists’ views of ethical problems in 37 nations, supported by NICHD and the Human Genome Program of the NIH, was completed in 1996 and the findings will soon be published.

Books by Dr. Fetcher include: Coping With Genetic Disorders (Harper and Row, 1982); with Mark I. Evans, Alan O. Dixler and Joseph D. Schulman: Fetal Diagnosis and Therapy: Science, Ethics and the Law (Lippincott, 1989); with Norman Quist and Albert R. Jonson: Ethics Consultation in Health Care (Health Administration Press, 1989); and with Franklin G. Miller, Paul A. Lombardo, and Mary Faith Marshall: Introduction to Clinical Ethics, 2nd Edn. (University Publishing Group, 1997). He has published 235 articles or book chapters on topics in biomedical ethics, and given Congressional testimony on in vitro fertilization, human genetic engineering, advance directives, and fetal tissue transplantation research. He recently testified before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on issues in federal oversight of research involving human subjects.