All lectures take place at 3647 Peel, Don Bates Seminar Room 101 until noted otherwise.
PLEASE NOTE THAT SEMINAR TIMES MAY VARY, SO BE SURE TO CHECK EACH INDIVIDUAL LISTING CAREFULLY
SPRING 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 13:30 - 15:00PM
Erik Parens
Senior Research Scholar
On What Neuroscience Can -- and Can't -- Teach Us about the Self
In 1994, Francis Crick announced his "Astonishing Hypothesis," that human beings are "no more than a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." In my talk, I will explain what I take to be deeply right - and deeply wrong - about that claim. Further, I will suggest that if we can get better at remembering the respects in which his claim is right and wrong, we can perhaps become more humane toward others and humbler about ourselves.
FALL 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012 at 1:00PM - 2:30PM
Jim Lavery, MSc, PhD
Research Scientist, Centre for Research on Inner City Health, and Centre for Global Health Research, St. Michael's Hospital, Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto
Why should we engage communities in global health research?
In vaccine trials, HIV prevention trials, the introduction of controversial new health technologies, such as genetically modified mosquitoes for the control of vector-borne diseases, and other types of global health research, it has become widely accepted that engaging the host communities matters ethically. Yet there are no clear accounts of why. In this seminar, I will draw on our recent and current work to propose an explanation. The proposal, which reflects an interests-based account of research ethics, also has implications for how "community" should be understood in the context of research, and therefore who should be engaged, and how. Using several case examples from own work, I will then briefly explore the possible implications of this analysis for research policy, research ethics guidance, and research practices in global health.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012 at 1:00PM - 2:30PM
Gail Geller, Sc.D., M.H.S.
Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Department of Medicine and Berman Institute of Bioethics
The Impact of Uncertainty in Medical Training and Practice
Gail Geller, Sc.D., M.H.S. is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University with joint appointments in the Department of Pediatrics and the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Departments of Health, Behavior & Society and Health Policy & Management. She is a core faculty member in the Berman Institute of Bioethics (BI) and served as Co-Deputy Director of the BI’s Greenwall Fellowship Program in Bioethics & Health Policy. She also oversees the “social, behavioral and ethical” strands in the undergraduate medical curriculum. Gail received her B.S. in human development & family studies from Cornell University and her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health with concentrations in bioethics and social & behavioral science.
Dr. Geller’s research interests have focused on clinician-patient communication and informed consent under conditions of uncertainty, professionalism and humanism in medical education, cross-cultural variation in concepts of health and disease, and clinician suffering and moral distress. She has explored these interests in a range of health care contexts in which uncertainty looms large, including genetics and genomics, complementary & alternative medicine, and palliative care.
Dr. Geller has served on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities, and the IOM Committee on the Review of Omics-Based Tests for Predicting Patient Outcomes in Clinical Trials. She was a Consultant to the Ethics Working Group of the National Children’s Study, the Informed Consent Working Group of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing (SACGT), and the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center.
SPRING 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 11:00AM - 12:30PM
Roberto Abadie
Research Associate Biomedical Ethics Unit
The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects
Roberto Abadie will discuss his latest book, The Professional Guinea Pig, where he documents the emergence of the professional research subject in Phase I clinical trials testing the safety of drugs in development. Until the mid-1970s Phase I trials were conducted on prisoners. After that practice was outlawed, the pharmaceutical industry needed a replacement population and began to aggressively recruit healthy, paid subjects, some of whom came to depend on the income, earning their living by continuously taking part in these trials. Drawing on ethnographic research among self-identified “professional guinea pigs” in Philadelphia, Abadie examines their experiences and views on the conduct of the trials and the risks they assume by participating.
Friday, March 9, 2012 at 11:00AM - 12:30PM
Kristin Voigt
Post-doctoral Fellow Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health & Biomedical Ethics Unit McGill University
Shame, stigma and the ethics of health promotion
Tackling the stigmatisation and negative perception of various health conditions and health behaviours is an important goal in many areas of public health. More recently, however, public health initiatives have begun to rely on strategies that aim to ‘denormalise’ certain behaviours, i.e. to make them appear less common and less desirable. The rationale underlying this approach is that the social unacceptability of particular behaviours can be a strong motivator for behaviour change. That this approach risks stigmatising those who engage in the targeted behaviours has been recognised in the debate but public health experts disagree on whether denormalisation necessarily leads to stigma and on whether stigmatisation could be an acceptable cost in the pursuit of population health. This paper aims to assess whether denormalisation should be considered part of the public health ‘armoury’ and, if so, what principles or considerations should guide its use.
Past seminar speakers have included:
Nancy M.P. King
Program in Bioethics, Health, and Society, Wake Forest University
Therapeutic Overestimation in Early-Phase Research
April 25, 2008*
Charles Weijer
Philosophy, University of Western Ontario
"Clinical Equipoise: Then and Now"
May 12, 2008
Alex John London
Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
"Research Subjects on the Auction Block: Some Problems for Procedural Approaches to Justice"
November 21, 2008
Robert D. Truog
Pediatrics, Harvard University
"Death, Brain Death, and the Ethics of Organ Transplantation"
December 3, 2008
Daniel Weinstock
Philosophy, Université de Montréal
"How Political Philosophers Should Think About Health"
January 24, 2009
Irving Kirsch, PhD
"The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the antidepressant Myth"
October 14, 2009
Avi Craimer, BA, MA, PhD candidate
"The Disability Paradox and Standards of Well Being"
November 6, 2009
* Sponsored by a gift from the McGill Medical School Class of 1970
SPONSORED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
Book Symposium on Shlomi Segall's Health Luck and Justice, Princeton University Press, 2009
COMMENTS:
Daniel Weinstock, Université de Montréal
Nicholas King, McGill University
REPLIES:
Shlomi Segall, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
FOLLOWED BY
"Equality of Opportunity, for Health"
Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Sept. 17, 2010
Scott Kim, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Co-Director of the Center for Bioethics, Decision and Social Sciences in Medicine - University of Michigan
"What to do about Therapeutic Orientation of Research Subjects"
Margrit Shildrick
Reader in Gender Studies School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Queen's University Belfast
"The phenomenology of hybrid bodies: rethinking bioethics and organ transplantation"
January 7,2011
Nancy M.P. King, JD,
Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy Wake Forest University School of Medicine Co-Director, WFU Center for Bioethics, Health, and Society
"First in Human Trials and the Research-Treatment Distinction: Bright Line, Blur, or Bust?"
May 12, 2011