Princeton Weekly Bulletin February 22, 1999
Students to host bioethics conference featuring Wilmut
When Daniel Powell '00 was reading articles by some of the great thinkers in the field of bioethics last year, he had a chance to do something few other students can do. He called them up and asked them to come talk about their work. Amazingly, they all said yes.
Powell is one of the organizers of Bioethics in the New Millennium, a conference to be held on campus February 26 and 27. The Princeton Bioethics Forum, the undergraduate student group that put the conference together, has had great success in attracting leading players in the field.
The event will bring together such figures as Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly, the cloned sheep, and Francis Collins, director of the human genome project at the National Institutes of Health.
Unlike most conferences in the field, this one will be geared toward undergraduate participants. Some 300 students from 36 states have signed up to participate, according to conference chair Katie Tillman '99. Tillman is president of the Bioethics Forum, which was 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.
The conference will feature five keynote speakers: Wilmut and Collins, as well as President Shapiro, chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission; Roy Vagelos, former CEO of Merck and Co. and current chair 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.
There will be 24 other speakers, including bioethicists, business leaders and authors, who 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. 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. Real-life groups, such as ethics boards at hospitals, "have to make decisions," Deep said. "They're not in a position where they can just ponder the theoretical issues. We want to bring bioethical issues onto a real-world plane."
"The field of bioethics has exploded in the last two decades, as technological developments offer heretofore unimaginable choices about how we are born and how we die," said conference participant Alta Charo, a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission and a senior fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. "Today's college students will be exercising those choices without the benefit of their parents' experience, as none of their parents had these options. This makes it ever more essential that college students educate themselves about these issues."
For more information about the conference and a complete list of speakers, see the Bioethics Forum's Web site at www.princeton.edu/~bioethic.