An artful profile.

Congratulations to Commonweal on publishing Paul Lauritzen's excellent article on Daniel Callahan ("Daniel Callahan & Bioethics," June 1). Callahan has long deserved a public evaluation of his life's work and Lauritzen has brilliantly provided it.

I have followed Callahan's work with admiration since we were in graduate school together at Georgetown in the 1950s and I've read every article and the nine books he wrote or edited while at Commonweal in the '60s. As the "nonexpert" on the original board of what came to be called the Hastings Center, I watched as Callahan and Will Gaylin made that tiny entity into the nation's premier bioethics center.

Although I read most of what came out of the center, much of it by Calllahan, (my favorite is The Troubled Dream of Life--perhaps because it is his most personal) I could not have written a piece as artful and comprehensive as Lauritzen's.

WILLIAM NAGLE

Marblehead, Mass.