Princeton Weekly Bulletin, April 6, 1998
Just pick up the phone
Students develop Bioethics Forum to consider issues in discussions, in journal, on Web
By JoAnn Gutin
The Princeton Bioethics Forum was born with a simple phone call. Today, scarcely three years later, it has its own journal, its own speaker series, its own Web page, its own artist-designed T-shirt and soon (members hope) its own endowment. But phone calls are still a forum mainstay: founder Erica Seiguer '98, current president Katie Tillman '99 and any of the officers will call anybody and ask anything to advance the fledgling organization.
The phone call that launched the forum was a routine call home. Seiguer, in a conversation with her mother, a physician, mentioned reading a newspaper article about the Human Genome Project. In the piece, an eminent scientist confessed that he and his colleagues had been blindsided by the discovery that a gene causing certain types of breast cancer occurred at high rates in Jewish women of Ashkenazi descent.
"He said something like, 'We thought we'd have a few years to figure out what to do with this sort of genetic information, but things are moving too fast,'" Seiguer recalls. "And I thought, 'These are really important issues -- I thought the experts had them covered!'"
After she hung up, pre-med Seiguer decided to figure out how to continue this conversation at Princeton. She learned that the Ira W. DeCamp Foundation had funded a named chair in bioethics, but it had not yet been filled. However, a list of the search committee members existed. "So I started calling people on the list," says Seiguer cheerfully.
Paul Benacerraf, chair of the Philosophy Department and of the search committee, suggested e-mailing all the philosophy majors to see if anyone was interested in discussing bioethics. The philosophy students who responded helped Seiguer post signs around campus. Forty people showed up for the first meeting.
Josh Fost, a graduate student in psychology, saw one of those posters, and next time he called home, Fost mentioned the forum to his father, Norman Fost '60, MD. Within the year, Fost senior, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin, had become the first visiting DeCamp professor.
SRO programs
With Fost on campus in '96-97, the organization really took off. The forum sponsored panels on such hot issues as informed consent for genetic testing, assisted suicide and posthumous reproduction. The panel they organized on cloning, held shortly after Ian Wilmut announced he had created Dolly the sheep, produced an SRO crowd in Whig Hall. This fall they staged a sequel moderated by President Shapiro and again had 'em standing in the aisles.
Among those standees and among forum members are students from many academic disciplines. "I thought it would be all pre-meds," says Seiguer, "but we have lots of philosophy majors, some engineers, some Woodrow Wilson majors." The head of the Speaker's Committee is a classics major, and president Tillman is in chemistry. "I'm just interested in questions that don't have obvious answers," Tillman explains.
When the forum decided last year to launch a national journal, the first undergraduate publication of its kind, members started working the phones again. They realized they'd need money to launch the journal; to get money they'd need grants; to get grants they'd need an advisory council.
So, says Seiguer, with the help of Norman Fost and Jon Thorsen of the Development Office, "We sat down and made a list of 13 names, people who would be on our dream advisory board." Their ambitious list included a university president, the president of the nations' biggest medical philanthropic foundation and an associate justice of the state supreme court. "We figured half of them would turn us down," Seiguer says, "and every single one said yes!"
The organization keeps growing. In addition to hosting discussion groups, they've attracted a variety of speakers. Marcia Angell, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and frequent op-ed and TV commentator on medical ethics, is coming to give a lecture on April 6.
After that, the group's next big event is a colloquium scheduled for Reunions Weekend. That's also when the maiden issue of the Princeton Journal of Bioethics appears, as does the forum T-shirt.
The design on that shirt -- a pair of cloned sheep skipping hand-in-hand across a meadow -- was drawn by none other than New Yorker cartoonist Henry Martin '48. Asked how she got such a well known artist to create the image and then contribute it gratis to this upstart undergraduate group, Seiguer smiles serenely.
"It wasn't that hard," she says. "I just called him up."