At a Saturday conference on bioethics at Union College, international leaders in the field shared the kinds of conundrums they face, leading some to suggest they would benefit from having a code of conduct.
Robert Baker, director of the Center for Bioethics and Clinical Leadership at Union, offered this example: A pharmaceutical company discovers in the middle of a patient trial that the new drug will cost five times more than expected. Do the trials continue?
Peter Whitehouse, from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, had a second: Should a practicing physician who makes a healthy second income speaking at pharmaceutical company functions disclose his or her relationship with the drug firm, and if so, should the amount of money being accepted be revealed?
Such were the discussions in the main conference room and in the halls of a Union College conference center as the college, along with Albany Medical College, sponsored the first American conference to address not just the issues of bioethics, but the ethics of the ethicists themselves. The conference, attended by about 90 medical and ethical professionals, began Thursday night at the medical college and continued through Saturday afternoon in Schenectady.
Bioethics is the “discipline dealing with the ethical implications of biological research and applications especially in medicine,” according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
The ethical quandaries of medicine have journeyed far from questions related to hospital treatments and diagnosis, Baker said.
“The doctors would grab me and ask me for advice,” Baker said of his early ethicist days in the 1970s. “They were desperate to talk to somebody” about issues like when to remove feeding tubes.
“We rushed in and got involved, and made up the rules as we went along,” Baker said.
This weekend, the discussion revolved around pharmaceuticals and the possibility of creating a code for ethicists.
Offering the drug trials as example, Baker said the answer was clear: Yes, the trials continue because the companies have a responsibility to patients and medical science to finish what they began. Plus, the study could pave the way for finding a cheaper drug.
In his Saturday afternoon talk, he noted that Canada already has a code of ethics for bioethicists.
As with all philosophical discussions, there were dissenters.
“Bioethics ought not to be a profession,” Whitehouse said. “The world would be a better place if everyone thought of themselves as a bioethicist.”
The Schenectady-Albany conference begins a conversation that Baker said will continue in the fall, at the national gathering of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities.