Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 75(4) November 2025
Introducing the Bios Centre
Bios Centre is a new, independent medical ethics charity. Founded in 2019 as a research group, we aim to provide thoughtful, high-quality bioethics research for an interdisciplinary and otherwise diverse readership.
Bios explores ethical issues in health care, producing academic and more popular articles, holding monthly seminars and helping groups and individual health care professionals think through moral questions raised by their work.
In terms of academic and professional backgrounds, researchers’ degrees are in philosophy, law, science and medicine. Our core staff are UK-based, including Dr Ilaria Bertini, who holds a Ph.D in Constitutional Law from the University of Milan-Bicocca together with a Doctor Europaeus certificate. The majority of our research associates are also UK-based, including Dr Toni Saad and Dr Calum Miller who work in the NHS.
We are not a faith-based organisation as such; however, Bios researchers are in fact Catholics or other Christians, while our director Dr Anthony McCarthy and senior research fellow Dr Helen Watt worked for the Anscombe Bioethics Centre for many years.
Publications of Bios researchers to date include a book, Agency, Pregnancy and Persons – Essays in Defence of Human Life and scores of articles, both academic and more popular, in a range of journals and other outlets around the world.
For a small sample of our research, please see our website at www.bioscentre.org. Many of our online seminars, on subjects ranging from assisted suicide to ‘terminal anorexia’ to reproductive coercion, are available on the Bios Centre YouTube channel.
To receive information on our meetings and publications, CMA members
and others are invited to subscribe via the Bios Centre website for free
regular updates. Donations to support our work in bioethics are most
welcome, and can be made via the website or care of our Treasurer,
John Atherton,
25 Cundell Way,
Kings Worthy,
Winchester
SO23 7NP.