Healthcare Programming

Below are some highlights from our past healthcare-related events.

  • Annual Ethics and Social Work Conference: This half-day conference affords social work professionals an opportunity to earn Continuing Education Units. Recent topics have included understanding Adverse Childhood Events (ACE) scoring, Virtual Behavioral Health Integration, the integration of Behavioral Health and primary care, and the ethical considerations in working with human trafficking victims, and the role of social workers in  advance care planning.
  • Marina Levina, “Body Disruptions: Biohacking and the Politics of Memory”: Much discussion of biohacking has focused on either making an argument for its revolutionary potential to democratize access to biotechnologies or warn of the possible destructive and dangerous potential of the practice. Prof. Levina (University of Memphis) aimed to move the conversation beyond these two binaries, and looked at how the practice discursively and affectively constructs bodies, communities, and politics.
  • Alessandro Delfanti, “The History of Politics of Distributed Biotechnology”: Prof. Delfanti (University of Toronto) envisions a biotechnology free from centralized control, open to public participation, based on market-like mechanisms and consumer-friendly. He discussed how this vision of distributed biotechnology intersects with the broader political economy of science.
  • Todd Kuiken, “How DIY Bio Gets Ahead on Ethics, Biosafety and Biosecurity”: Prof. Kuiken (N.C. State University) discussed the policies and practices that the “DIY bio community” has established to address biosafety, biosecurity and ethical issues that arise from the democratization of biology.  
  • Expanding Medical Aid in Dying Conference: This Center City conference featured keynote speakers Barbara Mancini, RN0—a death and dignity activist as seen on CBS’s 60 Minutes—and Kathryn L. Tucker, JD—Executive Director of the End of Life Liberty Project.
  • Mark Rothstein, “Ethical Challenges of Unregulated Health Research Using Mobile Devices”: Prof. Rothstein (University of Louisville School of Medicine) discussed informed consent, privacy, and return of results, when unregulated researchers undertake health research with mobile devices (e.g. via apps that collect information such as heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, and other measurements).
  • Lynette Reid, “Precision in medical imaging: what are the ethical and epistemic trade-offs?”: Current debates about over-diagnosis in cancer screening show the need to scrutinize critically our deeply held assumptions about objectivity in medical imaging. Prof. Reid (Dalhousie University) proposed for debate that there may be conditions under which an imprecise medical image is a better medical image.
  • Benjamin Hippen, “Ethical challenges posed by APO L-1 screening in renal transplantation”: Dr. Hippen (UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine; Metrolina Nephrology Associates, P.A.) discussed the debate over the appropriate uses (if any) of APO L-1 protein testing on Chromosome 22q. The debate transpires in the multivalent contexts of the history of eugenics and scientific racism. 
  • Nathaniel Comfort, “In Pursuit of Perfection: Controlling Human Evolution from Eugenics to CRISPR”: Since Ancient Greece, humans have dreamed of creating genetic utopias, in which disease is eradicated and we are all smart, strong, kind, and beautiful. Prof. Comfort (Johns Hopkins University) discussed whether current developments in genetic technologies risk the return of eugenics.