Catalog Description:Medicine and the biomedical sciences are advancing rapidly. No other field of human inquiry has the potential to transform society as radically in the coming decades. And yet, with each advance we face new questions about how to use our medical knowledge to begin, end, and reshape human lives. In bioethics we’ll explore some of the most pressing dilemma of the 21st Century. Is healthcare a right? Is abortion moral? If we can reshape the human genome to end aging, stop disease, and enhance our abilities, should we?
My description: This class was a very interesting course to take as we discussed ethical implications of many common and uncommon medical practices. The class was very interactive and we took votes multiple times a class period to display the different opinions of the members in the class. After each vote people who voted for both sides of the poll were able to give their reasoning for voting for either side and why they thought their opinions were ethical or not.
The project I choose to use for this class was my midterm take home essays. We didn’t have many long term projects in this class as it was mostly discussion based but for this project were we given 4 short essay questions based on the current topics of the course, then we choose 2 questions to answer and had a week to write and submit them. I liked this project because it made me think about questions in a different way than I typically would, not whether someone should do something or not but whether it was moral for them to or not.
