Over the past 30 years, biomedical ethics has developed and matured into a major area of scholarly inquiry. Professionals from philosophy, medicine, public health, nursing, the life sciences, law, social work, management, public policy, the social sciences, religious studies, and other areas have contributed to the biomedical ethics literature in important ways. The application of conceptual analytical techniques to ethical issues in science and medicine and the emergence of empirically-based scholarship in ethics have helped to help inform the practice of medicine and to test traditional philosophical tenets of bioethics. To meet the need for scholars with the interdisciplinary training required for such research, the CWRU School of Medicine’s Bioethics Department created the nation's first Ph.D. program in Bioethics in 2004. The program's mission is to train researchers to conceptualize, design, and conduct both normative ethical analyses and empirical research on bioethics issues.