The inaugural annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law [AABHL] will take place in Adelaide from July 1 to 4. (The Australasian Bioethics Association and the Australasian and New Zealand Institute of Health Law and Ethics have recently merged to form the AABHL. This year’s topic is “Choice... do we have any?  Who chooses what is ethical? Who should choose? What shapes choice?”

The invited speakers include Australian human rights activist Julian Burnside, philosopher and neurosurgeon Grant Gillett, legal scholar Ngaire Naffine, and bioethicist Wendy Rogers. For registration details, a draft program and a guidelines for submitting papers, see the conference website.

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The Hastings Center Report, one of the world’s leading bioethics journals, is marking its 40th anniversary with an informal essay contest about the future of bioethics. "We'll read anything that any student, graduate fellow, or untenured professor in bioethics send us (current or former Center staff excluded), and we'll publish the best of the lot in the November-December issue," says editor Gregory E. Kaebnick.

Essays might call for new ways of doing bioethics or examine the implications of trends within the general categories that the Center now addresses--clinical care, public health, health policy, new technologies, and medical research. Essays might also identify particular underexamined topics within the generally accepted categories. The ideal essay would be 1600 words long. Essays can be sent to the editorial staff at editorial@thehastingscenter.org by August 15.