Student Bioethics Conference Attracts Big Shots

NHGRI director Francis Collins speaks with students after participating in a panel discussion at Princeton's student-run bioethics conference. How might undergraduate students interested in discussing bioethics with the top people in the field get science superstars such as Francis Collins and Ian Wilmut to show up at their doorstep? Simple: E-mail them and ask. At least that's what worked for the group of Princeton University undergraduates who orchestrated the first-ever student-run national bioethics conference, entitled "Bioethics in the New Millennium." On Feb. 26-27 on the Princeton campus, more than two dozen scientists and bioethicists, as well as 50 Princeton students and 250 other undergraduates from 92 colleges and universities across the country, attended the conference. John Arras, a professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, leads a student precept. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and Wilmut, principal investigator of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, gave keynote addresses along with Steve Fodor, president and CEO of Affymetrix Inc., and Roy Vagelos, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania board of trustees. Other visitors included John Arras, a professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, Norman Fost, director of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shirley Tilghman, chair of the Council on Science and Technology at Princeton, and Judy Chambers, the Monsanto Corp.'s director of international government affairs. The conference was an outgrowth of the Princeton Bioethics Forum (www.princeton.edu/~bioethic), an undergraduate organization set up a few years back to bring cutting-edge bioethics issues directly to students through a series of speakers and a national undergraduate bioethics journal, the first of its kind. Students are now working on a third volume of the Princeton Journal of Bioethics, which currently gets many more submissions--mostly from the United States and a few from Canada--than space permits. Abstracts of the first volume are currently available online; both volumes one and two are in print and reprints are available on request. When, about a year ago, then-Forum president and senior molecular biology major Erica Seiguer suggested that a conference was the next logical step for the forum, organizers went to work compiling a list of candidate speakers and inviting them via E-mail, since they had no funds to do a mass mailing or make dozens of phone calls. "We thought, 'Let's shoot big and see what happens,'" recalls Naburun Dasgupta, a sophomore molecular biology major at Princeton who helped out with the conference. "We just sent letters to some famous people figuring that they'd all say no, and they all said yes," says conference chair Katie Tillman, a senior chemistry major at Princeton. "So then [Erica] graduated and we were left with this conference to plan." The students spent the summer and fall hammering out the details, inviting more speakers, and planning the format. In addition to the keynote speeches, they decided to have precepts--each consisting of 25 students led by a prominent bioethicist. They also planned panel discussions and debate sessions in which participating students were asked to take sides on the controversial issues of reproductive ethics and placebo-controlled trials. Fortunately for the organizers, they didn't face this mammoth undertaking entirely on their own; they were able to enlist the help of Princeton University president and National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) chairman Harold T. Shapiro. "When they came to me with the idea ..., it was so ambitious I have to say that I had some skepticism that the students by themselves, or even with what help I could give them, would be able to [pull] it off," Shapiro recalls. "But they were so enthusiastic..., I didn't want to completely discourage them, so I said, 'All right, I'll help you when I can, and let's just take it step by step.'" Leon Rosenberg, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton, answers questions with students. Shapiro notes that getting all of the prominent scientists on the students' wish list to agree to come to campus, especially on the same two days, seemed unlikely regardless of how much notice invitees were given. "It didn't hurt that the meeting clearly involved a lot of personal input by Harold Shapiro," says Collins of agreeing to attend the conference. "Given his role as the head of the National Bioethics Advisory Board, I was pretty sure this meeting would be well run." As it turns out, most speakers made commitments almost immediately, and student interest mushroomed to such an extent that organizers had to actually turn some people away because of lack of dorm and classroom space, a task they hadn't planned on and didn't enjoy. But perhaps the biggest challenge organizers faced was raising the necessary money. "It was a pretty big insight into the real world, and I hope never have to do it again," Tillman remarks. Students found it hard to sell sponsors on the idea of an all-student-run conference. Tillman notes that the Princeton name and letters of recommendation from Shapiro helped to eventually convince organizations such as the Greenwall Foundation and The Institute for Genomic Research, and companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, to put up the needed funds. By all indications, the conference was a hit despite a few no-shows and an inconvenient snowstorm on the first day. "It was, I think, maybe the most successful conference we've had here on campus in a few years; says Shapiro, who attended about two-thirds of the meetings. "Some of our distinguished visitors told me it was a long time since they'd enjoyed a conference so much." Shapiro adds that the organizers kept the visitors extremely busy, so much so that one guest jokingly told him, "This is like Gulag bioethics. These people work us all day and all night." "I get a lot of invitations to meetings," remarks Collins, who's been to many student conferences on molecular genetics and biology but never one focusing on bioethics. "The ones that usually turn out to be the most fun are the ones that the students organize, because they're really interested in having interaction and discussion and not just a lot of people saying, 'next slide please.'" He adds that the lone drawback to the conference was the last-minute absence of well-known science writers Gina Kolata and Nicholas Wade at a panel discussion in which he participated. Through no fault of the students, the writers' absence turned the presentation on the media's portrayal of bioethics into a one-sided media bashing. Most students also appeared to find the conference worthwhile and informative, a chance to meet students with a variety of backgrounds, as well as some of the biggest names in science, and discuss bioethics issues that will likely affect their lives if not their careers. Shapiro has already received letters from visiting students praising the event. Says Collins, "The fact that it was primarily done by students and for students carried with it a certain atmosphere of irreverence, where all questions are on the table--and that's good." Ian Wilmut, principal investigator of the Roslin Institute, speaks with students after his keynote lecture. The small precepts at the conference were designed to further foster this "irreverence," allowing students to further engage in discussion about critical and controversial issues with both their peers and a bioethicist moderator. In one session, Gregory E. Pence, a professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama and author of Who's Afraid of Human Cloning?, attempted to debunk many of the common fears associated with cloning. "It made me think," said participant Jodi Kaplan, a sophomore pre-med student from Brandeis University. "You always hear the debates against cloning." Later in the day, students heard what the original cloner himself had to say. During his keynote address, Wilmut methodically went through several of the major potential applications of cloning, ranging from organ donation to human cloning to "bring back" a dead relative, and pointed out the potential ethical pitfalls associated with each. "I profoundly believe that it is very important that we go through this exercise," said Wilmut. "I guess I have a responsibility more than any singular individual, but it's one I think many people in this hall will share ... It is important that we help people to understand what the limitations are, and what [cloning] can offer." As part of two debate sessions, one each day, students worked with hypothetical scenarios. In one case, for example, they had to debate whether a sperm bank should allow a woman smelling of alcohol to be artificially inseminated upon her request. After dividing into sides, for and against, students presented their arguments and then, after discussing the case further and presented rebuttals, they voted. In one debate session, students voted overwhelmingly against inseminating the woman, although Dasgupta, who ran the session, noted that organizers had reached the opposite conclusion in prior test debates. According to Tillman, organizers wanted to prevent students from passively contemplating the philosophical side of these issues without applying such ideas to more practical situations. "We thought it would be too easy to have this conference with these amazing speakers and to have people sort of thinking on a real philosophical level and miss the aspect of bioethics that was a little scarier," she remarks. As for future bioethics conferences, Tillman thinks it'll be a few years before students will be willing or able to again take on such a huge logistical task, but she hopes to see it happen.

Student Bioethics Conference Attracts Big Shots

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