No sooner than I had said "yes" to Carol last summer, I began to have some misapprehensions about what I had done. Particularly as time moved on, I became increasingly aware of new responsibilities which had fallen on me and made it difficult for me to find the time to meet the obligation I had incurred to Carol. I must apologize to her and to Dr. Hearn, who is to comment upon my remarks, for not providing, for his reflection, much opportunity to see my paper in advance. But I have other misapprehensions. One, I don't know enough about the activities of those of you engaged in research on human tissue and the kinds of problems you face. I'm afraid I cannot speak too pointedly to issues that may be on your minds, for I have not had the opportunity to educate myself in the area as much as I would have liked. Another ground of misapprehension is that I find it very difficult to speak on as specific a topic as this except from the background of ideas and assumptions which I can't readily put out before you. Now this is, I think, especially a problem for philosophers, particularly one like myself. We don't have as much of a shared background in our discipline from which we speak as you scientists do. Within the scientific community you share a great deal in your assumptions, your methodology and your points of view, which enables you to move toward greater agreement; whereas in philosophy, it's the very assumptions, and the most basic ones, that are at issue, so that we cannot enjoy that community of shared background, assumptions and points of view that people in other disciplines have. This makes it particularly difficult. I don't come to you as an ethicist to speak on the ethical problems, but as a philosopher. You now feel uncertainty about the ethical issues in your research; what the philosopher brings is uncertainty about the nature of ethical issues. So we compound the uncertainties, and that makes it all the more difficult. But there are some remarks I would like to share with you and I hope I can make what I want to say intelligible without having to present the whole of the background from which I speak. No one will deny that human tissue research, both in vivo and in vitro, has produced beneficial results, and that it promises to continue to be a productive field. But then neither would anyone deny that beneficial results could be obtained by experimentation on human subjects in many others ways which we consider to be morally proscribed. And it is not just a matter of harmful effects outweighing beneficial results, or at least not in any simple way of evaluating consequences. There are some things we morally don't do (or at least morally condemn) even though they would have (or do have) beneficial results. What we wish to explore is whether there are things done or likely to be done in human tissue research that fall into this category. The most controversial area seems to be the use of fetuses and fetal material for research purposes. My remarks will focus on some of the issues in this area. 595