Who is the rightful parent of a test-tube baby? How should a physician honor a patient's right to die? Does the use of stem cells from human embryos in life-saving research violate a congressional ban? Should there be such a ban?

A new book by a Cornell University law professor offers a fresh approach to these and other ethical dilemmas that have arisen because of rapid advances in medical science. The book, Endings and Beginnings: Law, Medicine and Society in Assisted Life and Death by Larry I. Palmer, Cornell professor of law, was published by Praeger this summer.

Palmer argues that neither scientists nor the courts can provide all the answers, and that people should resist the tendency to look to them for a resolution of intimate matters such as birth and death. Nor should individual rights alone take primacy, he says, when society grapples with the issues raised by new reproductive technologies and methods that prolong human life, but not quality of life.

Instead, Palmer proposes, we should examine the laws and policies governing the beginning and end of life, apply them carefully and, when needed, figure out the best ways to change those that do not mesh with our values. In places like Oregon, which recently passed the "Death with Dignity" act, for example, Palmer's moderate approach calls for better pain care for the terminally ill rather than physician-assisted suicide or repealing the law.

"Larry Palmer shows that decisions for newborns and people with terminal illnesses must not be permitted to rest solely on either medical judgment or legal imperatives, that they inevitably — and rightly — entail religious convictions, individual values and family circumstances," wrote Daniel Kevles, professor the humanities, California Institute of Technology and the author of several books on the history of science.

Palmer's book includes chapters on: The Role of Law in Our Intimate Lives; Science in the Service of Medicine and Law; Assisted Reproduction: Do We Need a Legislative Definition of the Family?; Creating One's Own Death: Is There a Constitutional Right to Die?; Chronically Ill or Terminal?: A Question for Legislatures; The Role of Physicians in Generational Continuity; The Role of Physicians in Our Dying: Relievers of "Suffering"?; Physicians' Constitutional Rights: Relievers of "Pain"? Physicians' Legislative Privileges to Assist Life or Death: Professionalism, Autonomy and Medical Progress.

Palmer has taught courses on law and medicine for many years at Cornell. He is the author of Law, Medicine and Social Justice (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989) and numerous journal articles dealing with law, medicine and policy. He earned his B. A. at Harvard University in 1966 and his law degree from Yale in 1969. He practiced law in California and was an associate professor at Rutgers University School of Law-Camden before coming to Cornell in 1975. He is executive producer and author of the study guide for the award-winning education video "Susceptible to Kindness: Miss Evers' Boys and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Cornell University, 1994)."

For review copies, contact Judy Lipner, Praeger Publishers, Westport, Conn., (203) 226-3571, ext. 3382.