Bioethics Students Explore Tough Questions

5/21/2018

For each of the past two years, groups of Rivers seniors have devoted hours to tackling issues that most adults would find daunting, through Rivers’ Bioethics Program, spearheaded by Dr. Julian Willard, Chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department. This year’s participants—Louise Ambler, Emma Chowdhury, and Julia Slayne—recently presented their research papers not only to the Rivers community but also to Boston’s Community Ethics Committee (CEC), a diverse group of citizens who meet monthly to provide feedback on medical ethics policies to the Harvard teaching hospitals. Next year’s Bioethics Program participants will be juniors Lisa Byrne, Natalie Hall, Colette Meier, and Rebecca Stachel.

The Bioethics Program, nominally called a “club” at Rivers, grew out of Dr. Willard’s fellowship at Harvard’s Center for Bioethics (HCB) and is designed to engage all students, but especially those with an interest in medicine and other biomedical fields.

“I've always been interested in ethical questions, so that's what originally drew me to the Bioethics Program,” said Emma Chowdhury. “Thinking through unanswerable questions and clearly vocalizing your thoughts about a nuanced issue is extremely hard, and it’s a skill I hardly practice in other classes. It has given me so much more respect for other people’s realities and experiences because every perspective is important to consider when dealing with an ethical issue.

“The CEC really reinforced that idea to me because it’s composed of people from all different backgrounds and of all different career paths. It was an incredible experience to go to a meeting when the two doctors in attendance were asking for help from the committee. These were highly trained professionals, and they felt like they weren’t able to properly do their job without the advice of the CEC. It struck me then that ethics is a part of everyone’s job, but it often isn’t given the time and training it warrants.”

The students follow a rigorous schedule, beginning with an introduction to the field of bioethics by reviewing issues like vaccination, organ transplantation, and end-of-life care, then meeting with mentors at the HCB to explore and choose their topics, and attending CEC sessions to witness real-life situations involving bioethical questions.

This year’s Bioethics participants covered three very different and timely topics in their papers: the ethics of designer babies, physician assisted death, and pregnancy considerations following a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome. With well-documented references and thoughtful deliberation of the pros and cons, their papers reflect the dilemmas that the medical professional and our larger communities face as the ability to alter the course of nature through science continues to grow.

“Our bioethics students had the opportunity in April to present their work at the Harvard Medical School Library to the Community Ethics Committee,” commented Dr. Willard. “This was a great way to engage both the academic Harvard community but also the diverse Boston area communities in a productive and meaningful way—very much in line with the philosophy behind our new Center for Community and Civic Engagement. I’m very interested in the educational potential of ethical questions and believe it is important to promote bioethical thinking and research skills in high school students. Our hope is that this program will enhance and inform the students’ own ethical engagement in the community and wider world.”

The club also hosted speakers during the year and the talks drew students interested in both bioethical as well as social justice issues. Speakers included Matthew Riley, a bioethics masters student from Harvard with deep background in social justice and civil rights leadership, and Kimberly Zieselman, the executive director of InterAct, an organization that advocates for intersex youth. Students were able to hear their presentations and ask questions during brown bag lunches in Hutton Hall.

Dr. Willard recently presented his work with Rivers’ Bioethics Program to other Harvard Bioethics Fellows, including the associated website he developed—www.bioethicsclub.org— an online resource for high school teachers interested in starting their own Bioethics Clubs. The website not only includes reference materials, but also provides a way for teachers to network as they implement similar programs in their own schools. He will also help run a 3-day “Teaching Bioethics” workshop for 30 high school science teachers later this summer at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute where he recently was a Yale-Hastings Scholar in Bioethics.

The papers produced by last year’s participants, Aliza Bloostein ’17 and Michelle Ryder ’17, are available on the Community Ethics Committee website at medicalethicsandme.org. The students were excited when Harvard Medical School’s bioethics writer Paul McLean, with thousands of followers in the medical community, tweeted links to their papers with the question “What can high school students teach #bioethics about #gene editing and #patient noncompliance?”

For the past several years, Dr. Willard has also been teaching a Rivers IDS course on Ethics, and has posted some of his students’ final projects on the CEC website. Click here to view some of the ways Rivers students have sought to engage the larger community in reflection about an ethical issue they consider important.

Back