The bigger questions in science

For a whopping 360 students, bioethics course tackles problems at “the core of our existence.”

By Cathy Shufro

When Political Science 309b—“Leading Issues in Bioethics”—met for the first time a year ago, Arthur W. Galston, Ph.D., the Eaton Professor Emeritus of Botany and lecturer in political science, expected that the 125-seat Mason Laboratory would be the right size for the undergraduate course. But on Day One students were “hanging from the rafters,” said Galston. The class moved to the 250-seat auditorium in the Whitney Humanities Center, but even there, a hundred students were left standing in the aisles. The course had to move again, this time to the cavernous law school auditorium. Class size: 360 students, making Poli Sci 309b one of the largest courses offered at Yale College last spring.

Although Galston was surprised by the huge turnout, he’d known that there was “pent-up demand” for a course in bioethics, the study of the ethical consequences of advances in biology. For 12 years, he had turned away 60 students each time he’d offered a bioethics seminar that was limited to 18.

“These are human interest problems. They get to the very core of our existence,” said Galston, a member of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Galston assembled his course by calling in experts from every corner of campus—from the law school to the divinity school, from forestry to genetics—and including what he called “the superstars from the medical school.” They gave 26 lectures on topics ranging from the ethics of stem cell research, to the Judeo-Christian attitude toward nature, to why Jehovah’s Witnesses seek the right to deny blood transfusions to their children.

“You have some large questions,” said Galston. “Is it fair that Mickey Mantle got a liver when he ruined his liver through excessive alcohol? Does nature have intrinsic value? Does it matter if a species goes extinct?”

“The best thing about the course was all the different voices we heard,” said Robert Fisher, a divinity school student who has worked as a hospital chaplain. Among the voices were those of Kenneth K. Kidd, Ph.D., professor of genetics, who discussed ownership of the human genome sequence and whether, from a geneticist’s perspective, race exists; author Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D. ’55, HS ’61, clinical professor of surgery, talking about the end of life; and Marc I. Lorber, M.D., professor of transplant surgery, on the ethics of obtaining organs for transplantation. Other speakers discussed topics ranging from world population growth to the potential hazards of genetically modified foods.

Suzana Zorca, a Yale College senior last spring who is now attending medical school, said the course complemented her biotechnology course. “You can’t help but be in [biotech] class and think of the ethical controversies that must be raging around these issues.”

“The course attracted people of literally every conceivable major,” said Andrew J. Read, a biology major. (The course is cross-listed as Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology 130b.) Although Read said that in some courses discussion sections can be tedious, the give-and-take was lively in his bioethics section, led by genetics doctoral student Stacey Thompson. “People were very much awake, with the discussions becoming so heated that we almost didn’t want to leave when the buzzer signaled the end. … I found myself re-evaluating some of my own opinions on the subjects, with the realization that most ethical dilemmas have no clear-cut answers.”

Galston’s interest in bioethics dates to the mid-1960s, when a chemical he’d developed to improve soybean production was combined with another and used as a defoliant in the Vietnam War. Galston was alarmed: the defoliant, the infamous Agent Orange, could cause birth defects. He and some colleagues eventually managed to convince President Richard Nixon to suspend the use of Agent Orange. “This is what catapulted me into activism and started me into bioethics,” said Galston.

The course was offered again this spring, and this time Galston reserved a large auditorium.

Reading list: Poli Sci 309B/MCDB 130b
Students taking the course bought three textbooks: Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, sixth edition, edited by Bonnie Steinbock, John D. Arras and Alex John London (McGraw-Hill); Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, third edition, edited by Louis P. Pojman (Wadsworth); and The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy, edited by Suzanne Holland, Karen Lebacqz and Laurie Zoloth (MIT Press). Students also read “The Oath of Hippocrates” and articles including “Dying Words” by Jerome E. Groopman (The New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2002); “Financial Compensation for Cadaver Organ Donation: Good Idea or Anathema,” by A.L. Caplan, C.T. Van Buren and N.L. Tilney (Transplantation Proceedings, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1993); and “Psst! Sell Your Kidney?” by Nicholas D. Kristof (The New York Times, Nov. 12, 2002).

A week of fund-raising nets $20,000 for the hungry and homeless

Thursday usually finds Interim Dean Dennis D. Spencer, M.D., HS ’77, in the operating room. But last November 20, he was on the stage in Harkness Auditorium, trying to raise money for the 11th annual Hunger and Homelessness Auction.

“I grew up on a farm,” he said. “I’m used to auctioning off cattle. We started at $2,000.”

Rather than cattle on the block that day, bidders could vie for weeklong stays at Vermont ski condos, dinners with deans, afternoon sloop sails in New Haven Harbor, or airplane rides over Connecticut.

Among the more offbeat items this year were break dance lessons by second-year student Edward Teng and a polar bear swim offered by second-year student Duncan Smith-Rohrberg, who agreed to plunge into the bidder’s choice of body of water and stay in for five minutes plus another minute for each $2 donated—to a maximum of $20. A group of his classmates offered $100 if he went in naked.

The auction has expanded over the years. What was once concentrated in a rowdy two hours in the auditorium now takes place over a week and includes several new events. First- and second-years hold a fund-raising football game on Harkness Lawn; there’s a “hunger banquet” to introduce people to the world of the food-deprived; a party at the weekly “Club Med” gathering in Harkness Dormitory benefits the auction fund; and for three days preceding the live auction there’s a silent auction in the Sterling Hall of Medicine.

This year’s auction netted more than $20,000, which will go to Loaves and Fishes, LifeHaven, Youth Continuum, New Haven Home Recovery, Community Health Care Van, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen and St. Thomas More, the Chapel and Catholic Center at Yale.

—John Curtis

Art class gives students of medicine, anatomy another resource to draw upon

On occasional Thursday afternoons throughout the academic year’s first semester, students returned after hours to the gross anatomy lab armed not with scalpels, but with brushes, paints, sketch pads and cameras. There, Mark R. Depman, M.D., a clinical instructor in medicine who works part time in the emergency room at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London and spends part of each week in his Fair Haven art studio, encouraged the students to examine the human body with an artist’s eye. This was not a drawing class—he offered no instruction on the fine points of charcoal or watercolors. Students could, he said, “use drawing and photography as a tool to stop and look again” at the human body.

Erin Kiehna, a second-year student, said the art class gave her a renewed appreciation for not only the body but the spirit that once occupied it. “It’s nice to sit in silence with a sketch pad in hand and really appreciate the donor,” she said. In anatomy class, she added, “You feel like you’re ransacking it, as you try to find everything.”

Depman, a member of the arts subcommittee of the Program for Humanities in Medicine, proposed the elective course last year and opened it to students at all levels of study. “I am hoping that over the coming year,” Depman said, “students will use this as an opportunity to look at the history of how we examine the body and how technology has changed the learning process.”

Although he started painting with oils and watercolors in his youth, Depman now creates images on film. (Depman’s latest work, two series of Cibachrome photographs and one of digital photographs, opened at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Manhattan’s Soho district in December.)

In the Thursday afternoon art class, students cluster around a cadaver or skeleton and draw with charcoals, paint with watercolors or set up cameras as they pursue an image. They come to the class with a mix of goals.

“After you’ve gone through the wards and spent time with patients you’re able to look at anatomy in a different way,” said Vernee Belcher, a fourth-year student who found the course an artistic way to become reacquainted with the human body two years after taking the gross anatomy class. Said Tina Dasgupta, in her third year of the M.D./Ph.D. program, “Every patient has a story. There is something more to a patient than a chief complaint and history of present illness.” She also found the course a way to take a fresh look at the human body. “Form meets function in a fantastic way.”

Depman, a Cornell medical graduate who studied drawing at Oxford, is fine-tuning the course and, sometime in the future, may also teach technical skills. For now, though, he’s satisfied to let students pursue their own ideas.

“It is a very important message for the medical school to put out there—that this is available and it can help you mature as a health care professional and a human being who practices medicine,” he said. “There is such a danger of losing the human impetus and human contact in practicing medicine.”

—J.C.


			Originally published in Yale Medicine, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 Yale University School of Medicine. All rights reserved.