I remember the guest speaker, Jeanne Chowning, gave us a presentation about Bioethics and bioethical principles during my first few days in this program. Jeanne Chowning began her presentation by helping us understand the principles of ethics through the usage of scenarios. Later she defined ethics as what a person should do, or the best course of action, reasoning for their actions, and how people should behave and treat one another. An illustration portraying the dangers of objectifying people for science is then shown to help us understand that science and the natural world can never be separated. In fact, similar to ethics, science relies on well justified reasonings and measurable evidence.
Comic by Sophie Wang
The powerpoint then segways into biomedical ethical principles. The first principle was respect, which means honoring the dignity of one and protecting weaker people. The second principle revolves around promoting positive and decreasing negative outcomes. Lastly, the third principle is justice, which sheds light on distributing benefits and burdens equitably.
To help us fully grasp the idea of science and ethics being inseparable. She presents another scenario where a transplant surgeon has the option of saving five lives at the cost of killing a healthy, innocent man. We were asked if we were in that scenario whether we would kill this man or not. Knowing that if I would kill this man I would be objectifying him and overlooking his worth, understanding that the outcome of my actions would be detrimental to me, and accepting that what I’m doing is unfair, makes me choose the more ethical route. Being able to break down this scenario understanding the 3 principles of ethics is one of the most notable highlights of this entire presentation.
The article, “Cancer Clinic Trials Exclude Too Many Patients: That’s Changing” Studies the reason why cancer patients join clinical trials 50% through research done by doctors such as Joe Ungers. The goal of this project is to make a huge difference in enrollment , so that cancer patients from all backgrounds that are usually excluded will have a chance during trials. This includes older patients, patients with additional health conditions like diabetes, patients with stage 4 cancer, those who carry unmeasurable tumors, and lastly patients with a low scoring performance. And even patients with brain metastasis who have been historically excluded from research. This is important because patients that were denied cancer trials because of not meeting the requirements will get a chance to be in cancer trials. This news is both exciting to me and all those who have been shunned by cancer researchers.