When I try to look ahead, I always go back to the Center's beginning, especially to our feelings of excitement and exhilaration at moving into uncharted areas. It was also scary to depart from problems and approaches certified by our teachers and training and to head off on our own. That was part of the excitement. We philosophers began by doing empirical work for the first time in our professional lives. Meeting with members of our engineering faculty, particularly one of the civil engineers, and consulting with practitioners, we learned about ethical problems in engineering. But we had anchored ourselves safely in a familiar task. We were preparing to teach a course-this time an innovative course on moral issues in engineering.

One of the great pleasures of the first decade was somehow finding ways to pursue the problems wherever they led us. When we became aware of problems of secrecy and confidentiality for engineers we were led to investigate intellectual property practices. We then turned to look at restrictions on the dissemination of scientific and technical information from the broad perspective of first amendment protection of free expression. Interest in openness and secrecy in communication of research findings drew our attention to the current proliferation of university-industry research relationships in biotechnology. We hope to investigate the impact of those arrangements on the traditional value of openness in the university. And I look forward to continuing to find the means to pursue lines of investigation where they lead.

I anticipate that we will find more opportunities to work with practitioners, through teaching in nonacademic settings, collaborating on projects with professional societies, and through bringing selected practitioners to the center as participants in a program of fellowships. In our first decade we sought and found opportunities for exchanges with practitioners. However, we had too much to learn about collaborating with other academic disciplines to be able to give as much energy to projects with practitioners as now we plan to do.

My guess is that we will have increasing contact with practitioners not only because we are more inclined and better prepared for it but also because practitioners themselves are more receptive. One reason is that the public remains firm in its demands for accountability. Another is that the structures of practice in the major professions are changing. For example, company supported health plans increasingly set the terms under which physicians practice. The resulting constraints alter the duties and privileges which define the physician's role. A third reason is that technological development continues to introduce new choices and present ethical problems which, if now wholly new, at least appear in new guises.

I look forward to the Center's growth in two main areas of activity: in carrying out funded research projects and in teaching and consulting in companies and other nonacademic settings. Both kinds of effort will be necessary for supporting the Center and for advancing understanding in applied ethics. It is difficult to say what balance should be and harder still to bring it about, but it is important not to forego the rewards of either kind of effort.

Reflecting about the subject matter with which we are concerned, I am struck by the usefulness of Plato's way of putting a key question that arises for all the professions. He observed that an occupation is based on a body of knowledge and a set of skills. Practitioners employ that knowledge and those skills according to a set of standards appropriate to that knowledge and those skills. They also earn their living from using the knowledge and skills and so they occupy a position in the marketplace, which has its appropriate standards. How do we relate the one set of standards to the other?