Recent decades have witnessed a profound shift in the ways that biomedical knowledge is discussed and applied. Issues once left solely to doctors and scientists are now considered by a diverse array of professionals: including philosophers, lawyers, social scientists, theologians and others. This new configuration, which took shape in the 1970s, goes by the name of ‘bioethics’. Sociologists and historians who explain the growth of bioethics in recent decades share a number of core assumptions. They argue it has become a valued socio-political enterprise because it constitutes an important component of post-industrial ‘knowledge economies’. Bioethics, they claim, performs a vital role by helping legitimate biomedical research: resolving the differing views of citizens, professionals and other stakeholders to produce guidelines for new procedures. In this worldview, the importance of bioethics is confirmed by the political establishment of national ethics committees across Europe, in the United States, Asia, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. Authors argue these national committees not only develop new guidelines and laws, but also ensure the credibility of the country in question by showing it to have a rigorous and accountable regulatory framework.

But these explanations have their limits, and are not universally applicable. While broad models are certainly appealing, we need to appreciate how nationally specific factors shape the contours and determine the influence of bioethics in specific locations. In Britain, bioethics has certainly become an important and high-profile enterprise, with ‘ethics experts’ discussing and helping regulate many procedures. But in a marked contrast to other countries, successive British governments have refused to establish a national ethics committee. This paper outlines why this is the case. I show that despite support from bioethicists and prominent doctors during the 1980s, politicians argued that a national committee would obstruct research and politicize ethics. I then detail how this reluctance led supporters to establish an independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 1991. I also show that while council members celebrated their independence from government, it ensured that their policy recommendations were largely ignored. I close by considering whether the absence of a national committee has limited the growth of British bioethics or whether it has, in fact, worked to its advantage.