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The American Journal of Bioethics 2.4 (2002) 10-12



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The Meaning of Graduate Education for Bioethics

David Magnus,
University of Pennsylvania

The recently completed American Society of Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) survey of graduate education raises a host of new opportunities and challenges for the field (ASBH 2001). On the one hand, these programs offer tremendous bene- fits to bioethics centers. The students serve as research assistants and assist in the production of knowledge for their mentors. They can provide stable sources of financial support for centers. Many of us find that through teaching we become better and more productive scholars. And the presence of students can transform an institution and provide an anchor for all of its activities. A colleague recently expressed, "nothing makes you real in a university like granting a degree." On the other hand, the existence of these programs raises difficult questions that must be addressed as we move forward. In what follows, I draw heavily from my experience as the director of the master's program in bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as my experience consulting for and closely observing the activities of other (often very different) programs.

What does the dramatic growth of graduate training programs in bioethics/medical humanities say about the current state of the"field"?

The huge growth in the field is surely at least partly a result of the increasing visibility of bioethics. It is hard to pick up a newspaper or watch a news show that does not feature a bioethics-related story, often featuring an "expert" bioethicist offering his or her analysis of the difficult biomedical issues facing society. It is no surprise that the field has attracted a large and growing following (along with a cadre of critics). This is likely to have a number of important implications for the field. Most of us in the field began our careers in a discipline that served as the primary focal point of our professional identity. Though many (but not all) of us eventually came to identify ourselves primarily as bioethicists, our previous disciplinary identities linger in important ways. Increasingly, college students (and even high-school and middle-school students) express the desire to enter the "field" of bioethics, and their choice of major and the activities they undertake are all aimed at bringing this about. It is not clear that the decision to enroll in a Ph.D. program in philosophy or anthropology or to attend law school carries the same meaning that it did in previous years.

At the same time, the fact that many of the master's programs in bioethics cater primarily to midcareer professionals will also likely produce important changes. Many of these students will not be people who attend professional bioethics meetings or publish in bioethics journals. What role will these people play, and how will they identify themselves? If a critical-care nurse who has spent some time on an ethics committee decides to pursue a master's in bioethics and then goes on to continue in his or her role as nurse and ethics committee member (with perhaps an increase in the ethics-related duties assigned to him or her), should he or she be regarded as a "bioethicist"? How will the growing number of such students, who come from a variety of backgrounds—medicine, nursing, pharmaceutical and biotech industry, law—change the way we define the field? Will we distinguish "professional" bioethicists (primarily academics) from "amateurs," much as the emerging discipline of biology distinguished scientists from amateur naturalists in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries?

The increasing demand from both sets of students is likely to create a new set of jobs: educators for these students. Bioethics may come to be driven by educational imperatives that it has not felt in the past. This will require us to make decisions about issues such as curriculum that will in many ways serve to define the field. How much philosophy, law, and social science ought to be required in these programs? What is the proper balance of...

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