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Princeton Students to Host National Bioethics Conference
Ian Wilmut, Cloner of Dolly, Will Speak
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Leading players in the field of bioethics will meet on the Princeton campus this month to discuss cloning, genetic testing and other ethical dilemmas that are beginning to face patients and health care policy makers alike.
The conference, one of the first of its kind to be organized by undergraduate students, will bring together such notable figures as Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly the cloned sheep, and Francis Collins, the director of the human genome project at the National Institutes of Health.
The two-day event will take place Feb. 26 and 27.
The conference is being organized by the Princeton Bioethics Forum, an undergraduate group formed three years ago out of a sense that advances in medical science and biotechnology were outpacing the nation’s ability to make decisions about how to use the new discoveries.
"There is a lack of thoughtful discussion about these issues in general," said Katie Tillman '99, president of the Bioethics Forum and chair of the conference. "The ethical discussions don’t tend to be based on too much fact. But it’s my opinion that it can still be discussed."
Unlike most conferences in the field, the Princeton meeting will be geared toward an audience of undergraduate students. More than 250 students from 36 states have already signed up to participate.
The conference will feature five keynote speakers: Wilmut and Collins, as well as Harold Shapiro, president of Princeton University and chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission; Roy Vagelos, the former CEO of Merck & Co. and chairman of a small biotech company; and Steve Fodor, president and CEO of Affymetrix, a biotech company that makes computer-chip-like devices that perform DNA tests. It will be the first time that Shapiro and Wilmut meet, students said.
There will be 24 other speakers, including bioethicists, business leaders and authors. These participants will lead small group discussions over the course of the conference. The discussion groups will be assigned case studies that all have to do with a specific issue. The second day, for example, the groups will talk about cases having to do with how researchers conduct placebo-controlled drug trials, in which some of the patients receive fake treatment.
At the end of the discussion periods, the groups will be required to reach a conclusion about their topics, said Alexee Deep '00, who organized the debates. That requirement will give students a feeling for the demands placed on real-life groups, such as ethics boards at hospitals.
"They have to make a decision," Deep said of hospital boards. "They are not in a position where they can just ponder the theoretical issues. We want to bring these bioethical issues down to a real-world plane."
The conference is the Bioethics Forum’s most ambitious project. The group started out by having a few speakers come to campus, then put on an event during last year’s reunion week. The idea for a conference started almost as a lark, because none of the students believed it would really be possible.
"We invited the four most famous people we could think of, thinking they all would refuse," Tillman said. "And they all said ‘Yes.’" From there, the students developed a list of the two dozen other high-level speakers, who also agreed to come with very little coaxing. The accomplishment is impressive because no one will be paid to participate, even though most of the speakers usually require a significant honorarium.
Daniel Brock, a bioethicist at Brown University, said he was struck by the Princeton students’ energy and initiative. "Undergraduate audiences, particularly on issues like this, are just as important as professional audiences," Brock said, noting that talking about a subject such as cloning does not require a lot technical knowledge. "They’re issues about what kind of society we want to have and what kind of parenting we want to have."
Another participant, Alta Charo, a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission and a senior fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics said of the student conference: "The field has exploded in the last two decades, as technological developments offer heretofore unimaginable choices about how we are born and how we die. Today's college students will be exercising those choices without the benefit of their parents' experiences, as none of their parents had these options. This makes it ever more essential that college students educate themselves about their options."
For more information about the conference and a complete list of speakers, see the Bioethics Forum’s website at www.princeton.edu/~bioethic.