An International Student's Perspective

During the last decade interest in bioethics among the global community has been constantly increasing. At the present time, however, the educational system in the United States offers the broadest spectrum of graduate programs in biomedical ethics. Given the lack of bioethics education in many countries, I believe that ongoing international educational collaboration in this field is very important. In this essay I offer my somewhat unique perspective, that of an international graduate student from Russia, on graduate programs in bioethics and medical humanities in the United States.

I graduated in May 2002 from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Center for Biomedical Ethics (which recently became Department of Bioethics) with an M.A. in bioethics. I am one of four foreign students who received fellowships from the Fogarty International Center to study bioethics at CWRU during the 2001-2002 academic year. Four universities in four countries (Russia, Romania, Nigeria, and Uganda) received an offer to send their students during a two-year period to the graduate program in bioethics. On the American side the Center for Biomedical Ethics at CWRU received grant support to enroll those students in its existing M.A. program.

The story of how I came to be an international graduate bioethics student is a simple one. I learned about the opportunity to study at CWRU from the supervisor of my M.S. program in biology at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. The university was going to develop a bioethics program; my supervisor knew that I had a personal interest in bioethics issues despite the fact that my scientific work at that time was rather far from bioethics. We talked in detail about the program itself and our particular needs in Saint Petersburg, and I decided to apply for the fellowship. I did this in part because I believe that we have an urgent need for bioethical education in my country. The culture of ethical reflection on problems in biomedicine is underdeveloped in Russia as well as in many countries around the world. There is a great need for people with some basic background in the study of ethical issues pertinent to biomedical sciences. Most especially, there is a need for experts on international research ethics. Due to our specific situation in Saint Petersburg, I counted the following among my goals as the first Russian to enroll in a bioethics degree program:

• to get a basic understanding of the broad spectrum of bioethical problems;
• to become familiar with the variety of philosophical, scientific, and social concepts and phenomena underlying those problems;
• to study different approaches used in bioethics and to obtain the experience of participating in discussions and processes essential to the field;
• to realize possible practical applicability of the material studied; and
• to get a deeper understanding of particular problems by doing some supervised research in specific areas in the field.

The M.A. program at CWRU is a one-year, full-time program, and we (the international students) attended classes together with 19 American students. In general, the structure of the program perfectly matched my main goals (this, of course, is easy to explain: CWRU's program was chosen by the Fogarty Center because it can provide the type of general introduction to the field that international students need). Core courses of the program, Foundations in Bioethics and Clinical Ethics Rotation, bring together theoretical knowledge about bioethics as a discipline and the practical opportunity to experience how issues discussed in class and in readings arise in real life. These two components of CWRU's M.A. program merit more detailed description.

First, I am very grateful to the faculty of the Center for their excellence in offering an overview of the main issues of bioethical concern. In the yearlong Foundations seminar, faculty members addressed different topics in accordance with their particular areas of expertise. We covered the broadest spectrum of problems we could cover in one year. Our class discussions were...