Thoughts on “The Case” in Public Bioethics This year I’ve been contemplating the ethics of highly publicized bioethics “cases.” Here I am thinking about medical (or medical-related) individual patient situations that enter mainstream awareness through news media, and then are debated in the public sphere, as well as among academic bioethicists. I am writing from the United States, where there is a history of these public cases shaping bioethics as a field. We can name patient