Bioethics Cohort 2025: Tackling Complicated Modern Questions in Bioethics

Julian Willard P’24, Interdisciplinary Studies Department Chair and founder of the bioethics program, gave a brief introduction about the program during the assembly. The cohort meets weekly throughout the academic year on top of their course load to consider ethical questions and topics in the medical field and discuss their research. 

While each student presented a short presentation to the Upper School community on Friday, they also completed much larger research papers on those topics as part of their participation in the program.

After a few months in the program, participants begin narrowing their focus, identifying a project or topic that inspires them. Shaw became interested in her topic after hearing about her mother’s doctoral thesis on the effect of AI biases in health care. “With that sparking my research, I began engaging with different cases of AI’s implementation of health care,” said Shaw. “AI is not just lines of code,” she concluded in the Upper School presentation. “It affects real people.”

Carroll explored the expanding research on neurological enhancements and brain-computer interface technology, which collects data from electrodes implanted in the brain. There is an extent to which the general public is comfortable with the concept of collecting health data from wearable technology, such as a Fitbit or an Oura ring, but the privacy implications of neurological data have not been fully explored. Does an employer have the right, for example, to request access to a sleep score in order to determine fitness to work? Carroll concluded that the technology enhancement can be useful if made accessible to everyone, but that there should be an established right to mental privacy and ownership of neural data.

Heckscher chose the question of using the gene-editing technology CRISPR to intervene in cases of fetal development. The technology, explained Hecksher, acts as a kind of medical scissors, but using it in this case raises questions about consent and ethics—will access to the technology be equal for those with potential birth abnormalities, or will it be a tool restricted to the wealthy?

Shaller and Alexandrescu focused on the ethics of end-of-life care in certain medical treatments. Shaller explored ethical challenges in LVAD surgery. An LVAD, or left ventricular assist device, is a pump used for patients in a state of heart failure as they wait on a transplant list. Such devices may extend life, but not always quality of life, complicating end-of-life decisions for patients and their families. 

Alexandrescu focused his research on medical aid in dying, sometimes called physician-assisted suicide—a topic that has long plagued lawmakers and communities. “This was the first topic that got me interested in the field of bioethics,” he shared during the assembly, also mentioning he has had conversations with his parents about their future wishes when they reach the end of life. Alexandrescu identified two guiding principles: patient autonomy and nonmaleficence (that is, “do no harm”), which he recommends to guide future discussions. 

A large component of the program is the partnership between the Rivers cohort and the Community Ethics Committee (CEC) at Harvard Medical School. Rivers students in the cohort meet with the committee twice a year to learn about bioethics in the medical profession and larger community, and they recently presented their research projects to the committee and received invaluable feedback. 

“It was great to take feedback from real professionals to make our presentations and papers better,” said Shaller about the meetings with the CEC. “It was also helpful to see different professions that involve bioethics—lawyers and doctors, students in medical school—and how they applied bioethics to their careers.” 

Shaw said she found it helpful to listen to the CEC and their discussions of AI when compiling her research. “The topics we are researching also build engagement outside of Rivers,” she said. The cohort met with Dr. Lori Bruce of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and other ethicists throughout the year. 

At their final meeting of the year, the cohort debriefed and discussed the future of their research, including the potential to publish on a bioethics club website or potentially on Harvard Medical School’s bioethics page. 

Reflecting on his year with the cohort, Alexandrescu noted, “This class helped me research and dive deeper into topics I didn’t know about before.”

Said Shaw, “I have always been interested in ethics. Understanding how applications of philosophy impact our day-to-day made me interested in how to apply philosophy to health care. The bioethics program engages with many different topics under health care, and to dive deeper into questions we may ask in biology and further our research with those concepts in bioethics was very appealing.”

“I thought it was really interesting that a lot of these issues don’t have a clear solution,” said Carroll. “There are professionals talking about it who still disagree on how to handle it.” 

While there is no agreed-upon solution to many of the topics discussed, the program invites students to explore very personal, human issues and offer insights into complex topics.