As I recently announced on my YouTube channel, I will be attending Harvard’s Master of Bioethics program in the fall. To kick off this new chapter, I wanted to write a post about what exactly bioethics is.
A Definition… Kind of.
Few can agree on a solid definition but the broad strokes remain the same. To break it down, ethics answers the question of “What should we do, considering every angle and perspective?” It is the study of competing values and morals. An in the context of bioethics, specifically those questions involving life sciences. The thing is that “bio” can include and intersect with so many different areas: medicine, biotech, public health policy, law, and theology.
Clinical Ethics
The easiest way to summarize this one is that clinical ethicists typically address issues where the wishes of patients, caregivers, or another proxy go directly against a provider’s medical judgement. Some examples include end of life care and denial of blood products. And outside of the patient-provider dyad, there are other clinical ethics questions such as organ donation assignment. All of these situations cause a host of questions around “What’s fair?”, “Who has decision-making rights?”, and many more. These are the questions that clinical bioethicists study in an attempt to make the right decisions (as “right” as they can be).
Research Ethics
In research involving “human subjects” (when you step back from it, it’s kind of creepy wording, huh?), each research institution has an entire board focused on reviewing research projects to ensure they meet basic ethical, moral, and safety standards. These boards are called Institutional Review Boards or IRB and they have to approve or exempt every single project that an academic institution conducts. Beyond academia, all drug/device clinical trials also must be approved to ensure that they are not doing more harm than good (a concept referred to as “nonmaleficence” in the ethics world).
Health Policy
Here is the area where I will most be able to apply my MPH coursework since, after all that was my entire degree concentration. When discussed through an ethics lens, policy questions are usually all some variation on “Does the good of the many outweigh the good of the few?” (a question first posed by Star Trek’s Spock, by the way). In many ways, health policy can dictate all other decisions and why it can arguably be the most important. Also illustrates the major overlap between medicine and law (a major attraction for this legal-lover but law-school-hater).
These are just three major areas of bioethics and I am so excited to start my education in the field! This was a very brief overview but I thought it might be helpful to preemptively answer some questions about what exactly bioethics is. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube and follow on Instagram to hear more about my life as a bioethics student at Harvard (eek! that’s still surreal).
