COURSE NAME: Bio-Ethics

SCHOOL DISTRICT: Malone

INSTRUCTOR: Denise Rogers

Full Year

COURSE PREREQUISITES: none

This course is designed to examine the collision of personal morals, societal ethics, and technology.
Students will be introduced to topics where they will use their biological background in the practice of
ethical decision.

The field of bioethics arose in the last quarter of the 20th century in response to major
popular movements (human rights, civil rights, patients' rights), new biomedical technologies
and scientific discoveries (respirators, in vitro fertilization, transplantation, the genome project,
recombinant DNA research), and gross violations of human rights (Nazi medical experiments,
Tuskegee syphilis study, human radiation experiments).

Bioethical deliberations consider the medical, scientific, societal, and political factors that

result in troubling dilemmas for individuals and societies. For example, new but imperfect medical
technologies typically solve one problem but create several others. A familiar example is the respirator,
which may keep someone alive but not really living, leaving others with difficult life-and-death choices
to make.

In science classes, students usually focus only on new vocabulary and scientific techniques.
Little attention is paid to the risks, benefits, strengths, and drawbacks of that technology.
They may never get around to considering the question "should we use this technology or
carry out this procedure just because we can?" Yet these questions are the key issues, and
finding the best answers affects the present and the future.

Through discussions of cases in bioethics, students can develop their analytical, critical thinking skills.
They see the value of an open mind. They come to understand that, although the school day is
compartmentalized into discrete subjects, problems in life are not. As students practice strategies
for identifying and analyzing ethical dilemmas, they gain experience expressing themselves civilly,
and they become better listeners, even toward those who are expressing opposing viewpoints.
They realize that, at times reasonable people may agree to disagree.

1/25/06