This course does not seek to provide answers to ethical questions. Instead, the course hopes to teach students two things. First, how do you recognize ethical or moral problems in science and medicine? When something does not feel right (whether cloning, or failing to clone) — what exactly is the nature of the discomfort? What kind of tensions and conflicts exist within biomedicine? Second, how can you think productively about ethical and moral problems? What processes create them? Why do people disagree about them? How can an understanding of philosophy or history help resolve them? By the end of the course students will hopefully have sophisticated and nuanced ideas about problems in bioethics, even if they do not have comfortable answers.

This seminar based course explores techniques for recognizing, analyzing, and resolving ethical dilemmas facing healthcare professionals and biomedical researchers in today’s highly regulated environment. Guest lectures by practicing clinicians, technologists, researchers, and regulators will include case studies, interactive small group discussions, and role-playing simulations. Professional conduct topics will include authorship, conflict of interest, data acquisition and management, and the protection of human subjects and animals involved in research programs.

This is a unit plan covering the history of the surgery. It is designed to take about 35 days (50-minute class periods). This unit is based on the book, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris. For each of the chapters, vocab activities, pre-reading activities, and reflection questions have been created. A final project is included at the end of the unit. To grade this unit, the book is chunked into Portfolios (Prologue to Chapter 4, Chapters 5-8, Chapter 9 to Epilogue), which are designed to be the formative grades. Each of these Portfolios has a Portfolio Checksheet, which is a list of assignments that must be turned in for that unit. The Portfolios can be returned to the students and used on the final project. The final project is the summative grade for the unit. Quizzes could be added to this unit to increase the number of summative grades. To make this unit easier to facilitate, I would suggest purchasing the Audio Book, along with the hardcopies to help read to the class.

This lesson introduces ethical standards of healthcare to students. Students will understand guiding ethical principles and their application to a career field’s code of ethics. Students will be able to differentiate between cultural and social ethical dilemmas. 

This lesson is focused around a case study created by Julia Omarzu with the Department of Psychology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. The case study addresses the moral, ethical, and medical issues surrounding the treatment for a young girl suffering from a rare genetic disorder called Fanconi anemia. The case study is written as a scripted discussion between medical and biotechnology professionals in regards to the processes, risks, and ethical concerns surrounding the use of genetic diagnosis, stem cells, and in-vitro fertilization. Students will be asked to respond to the ethical issues from the perspective of one of the seven characters from the case study as well as share their personal opinions.

One of the fastest-growing areas of medical research is that of genetic testing and gene therapy. This chapter introduces students to this area of DNA research and helps them explore the related ethical issues. Scientists have recently completed a preliminary ‰ŰĎmap‰Ű of all the genes in the human body. This is also known as the Human Genome Project and consists of all the sequences of DNA chemical units that tell a cell how to behave. This accomplishment has incredible benefits. However, it also raises new, complex issues that society cannot ignore.

In this course, social, ethical and clinical issues associated with the development of new biotechnologies and their integration into clinical practice is discussed. Basic scientists, clinicians, bioethicists, and social scientists present on the following four general topics: changing political economy of biotech research; problems associated with the adaption of new biotechnologies and findings from molecular biology for clinical settings; the ethical issues that emerge from clinical research and clinical use of new technologies; and the broader social ethics of access and inequality.

This unit plan is designed to spark students’ interest in critical thinking and scientific discovery. This unit is based on the book, “Survival of the Sickest: A medical maverick discovers why we need disease” by Jonathan Prince and Sharon Moalem. The book explores the evolution of different diseases throughout its eight chapters. The lesson plan is designed to take about 21 days (50-minute class periods). For this book, the class reads the Prologue together. Then, groups of students are assigned a chapter that they will teach to the class. Their teaching will include a presentation, activity, and facilitated discussion. (The unit plan helps the students learn how to do each of these tasks.) A final project is included at the end of the unit - a book review of the entire book.  The summative grade for this unit is multi-part - the teaching assignment and the book review. Three quizzes are included, which would also be small summative grades. The notes packets and teaching planning sheets are all formative grades. A team member peer review is another part of the project.