It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing away of Tom Beauchamp, on Wednesday, February 19, 2025.  Beloved husband of Ruth Faden; devoted father of Karine (Richard Fiore) Faden Fiore and Zachary (Katelyn Esmonde) Beauchamp; cherished grandfather of Samuel Fiore, Mateo Gurria, Alex Fiore, Anna Gurria, Eleanor Esmonde Beauchamp, and Daveed Esmonde Beauchamp. A funeral service will be held on Monday, February 24 at 10:00 am at the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center , 130 Center St., Vineyard Haven, MA 02568. The funeral service is available to view on Zoom (webinar): Click Here to view Interment to follow at Abel's Hill Cemetery - 322 S Rd, Chilmark, MA 02535

Shiva minyans will be held on Monday afternoon directly after burial, and  Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 6:30 pm at the family home in Chilmark.

Notes of condolence may be sent to: Ruth Faden at her Washington DC address.

Donations in Tom's name may be made to: CHAT (Communication Health, Advocacy & Therapy) - 310 South Main Street, Suite D, Lombard, IL 60148. Tom raised his daughter, Karine, to live Gandhi's words, "the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others," and she serves as CHAT's President & CEO.

Yehi Zichro Baruch - May Tom's memory be a blessing.

Writeup from the Washington Post (for Wash Post site click here ):

Tom Beauchamp, a philosopher and ethicist who helped codify boundaries on medical research involving human trials and sought to strengthen protocols on animal testing to recognize moral concerns such as pain and cognition, died Feb. 19 at a hospital in Washington. He was 85.

The cause was complications from a pulmonary embolism, said his son, Zack Beauchamp.

A Georgetown University professor, Dr. Beauchamp pursued work that encompassed scholarship as a leading expert in the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume and the rule-defining discipline of applied ethics.

In a career-shaping moment in 1978, Dr. Beauchamp (pronounced Beech-am) was called to put his studies — and his own views — into practice as part of a landmark treatise on American medical research that effectively set the framework for the modern field of bioethics.

The Belmont Report, with Dr. Beauchamp as the lead writer, summarized years of debate by scientists, lawyers and others in a special panel authorized by Congress in 1974. The group — known as the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research — was a cornerstone of legislative action prompted by disclosures of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which officials at the U.S. Public Health Service and other agencies had denied hundreds of impoverished Black men treatment for syphilis for decades to study the disease's ravages on the body.

Dr. Beauchamp was brought in after the commission crafted a broad set of principles — "respect for persons, justice and beneficence" — during meetings that included sessions at the Belmont Conference Center in Elkridge, Maryland.

"I said, 'And exactly what does the commission mean by these principles?'" Dr. Beauchamp recalled asking Michael Yesley, the commission's staff director. "And his answer was, 'I think they're looking to you to tell them that.'"

The report was adopted by U.S. agencies and was widely considered one of the foundations for bioethics, including guidelines for informed consent and the creation of independent committees to review research plans. "That word [bioethics] had just barely come into use," Dr. Beauchamp recounted in a 2016 interview at Columbia University.

Before the Belmont Report, medical ethics was largely set by standards under the Declaration of Helsinki, drafted in part as a repudiation of the abuses and deaths by Nazi doctors conducting experiments on Jewish prisoners and others.

Dr. Beauchamp "is a key figure in the foundation of the entire field of bioethics," said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. "No one else was as instrumental in creating the basic principles of American bioethics."

Dr. Beauchamp expanded on the Belmont Report in the book "Principles of Biomedical Ethics" (1979), co-written with philosopher and theologian James F. Childress, in what was regarded as another seminal text in the field. Dr. Beauchamp and Childress spelled out the ethical duties of physicians and other health-care workers with their patients.

With medical advances such as gene therapy, Dr. Beauchamp became increasingly outspoken on the need for greater oversight as more research moved into private biotech companies.

"The highest levels of uncertainty often attend the most inventive and untested work," Dr. Beauchamp and his wife, bioethicist Ruth Faden, wrote in an essay in the Baltimore Sun in March 2000. "Some must bear these risks that science and society ultimately benefit. … Practical import is that we owe those who assume risk of harm for our benefit a system of protections free of 'serious deficiencies.'"

He developed similar tenets around medical research using animals, building on views about human morality toward animals by Australian philosopher Peter Singer in the 1970s.

Dr. Beauchamp's books, such as "Principles of Animal Research Ethics" (2020), co-written with philosopher David DeGrazia, sought to address the added ethical complications of conducting tests on creatures incapable of giving consent or articulating their concerns.

Dr. Beauchamp acknowledged that animal testing was sometimes crucial for studies on new drugs and other medical innovations. However, he urged researchers to be mindful of pain thresholds for animals and recognize that primates and other species are aware of what they are experiencing.

He also encouraged more efforts to seek alternatives such as computer modeling or lab-grown cells. "Finally, there should be an upper limit to how much we can harm animals, regardless of the benefits of the science," Dr. Beauchamp told Science magazine. "No animal should be put in a position of experiencing severe suffering for a lengthy period of time."

Tom Lamar Beauchamp III was born in Austin on Dec. 2, 1939. His father was an insurance company executive, and his mother tended to the home.

Inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil rights movement, he began religious studies as a source for social change — receiving a bachelor's degree in theology and philosophy from Southern Methodist University in 1963 and a bachelor of divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1970. He also earned a doctorate in philosophy that same year from Johns Hopkins University.

"So, I had a dilemma: go into religious studies or to go into philosophy. And I chose to do something that was in between," he said in the Columbia interview.

He joined the Georgetown faculty in the early 1970s and later took an added position as senior research scholar at the university's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He retired in 2016.

His works on Hume include "Hume and the Problem of Causation" (1981), co-written with philosophy scholar Alexander Rosenberg, and he was co-editor of "The Critical Edition of the Works of David Hume" (1999). Dr. Beauchamp's other books include "A History and Theory of Informed Consent," (1986) co-written with Faden, and "The Human Use of Animals" (1998), co-written with ethicist F. Barbara Orlans and others.

Among his honors was the Henry Knowles Beecher Award from the Hastings Center in Garrison, New York, for contributions to bioethics.

Survivors include Faden, his wife of 45 years; two children, Zack Beauchamp and Karine Fiore; and six grandchildren.

NASA once sought Mr. Beauchamp's views on the use of animals in spaceflight research — a practice revived by the Soviet Union in the 1980s under an international program called Bion that used rhesus monkeys, rats, reptiles and other animals for medical tests in zero gravity.

Some of the animals did not survive the missions. The work by Mr. Beauchamp at NASA helped inform the space agency's Sundowner Report in 1996, which set stricter standards for animal welfare in NASA studies by declaring that "vertebrate animals are sentient" and that minimizing pain and distress for animals was a "moral imperative."

"So, what started off looking pretty grim, winds up with something pretty good," Dr. Beauchamp said. "That was my one success."

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