Daniel Callahan: Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System

Daniel Callahan is Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus of the Center. He was its cofounder in 1969 and served as its president between 1969 and 1996. He is also co-director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy. Over the years his research and writing have covered a wide range of issues, from the beginning until the end of life. In recent years, he has focused his attention on ethics and health policy. He has served as a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Medical School and is now a Senior Scholar at Yale. He received his B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. He has honorary degrees from the Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic, the University of Colorado, Williams College, Oregon State University, the State University of New York and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.





Dr. Callahan is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences; a former member of the Director’s Advisory Committee, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and of the Advisory Council, Office of Scientific Responsibility, Department of Health and Human Services. He won the 1996 Freedom and Scientific Responsibility Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is the author or editor of 41 books, including Taming the Beloved Beast: Why Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System (Princeton University Press, August 2009); Medicine and the Market: Equity vs. Choice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); The Research Imperative: What Price Better Health? (University of California Press, 2003); False Hopes (Simon & Schuster & Rutgers University Press, 1998); The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death (Simon & Schuster, 1993); What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress (Simon & Schuster, 1990); Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society (1987); The Tyranny of Survival (1973); Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (1970); Ethics in Hard Times (1982); and, with his wife, Sidney Callahan, Abortion: Understanding Differences (1984). He has contributed articles to Daedalus, Harpers, The Atlantic, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The New Republic, Health Affairs, and other journals.