Revisiting the launching of the Kennedy Institute: re-visioning the origins of bioethics.

Twenty-five years ago, on October 1, 1971, at a press conference held at Georgetown University, the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics, later called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, was offically inaugurated. To revisit that event -- and the Institute's five founding collaborators who spoke at it -- provides an opportunity to re-vision some of the most significant intellectual, moral, cultural, and political factors that shaped both this Institute and the then-nascent field of bioethics.