Upcoming Events
Center Director's Message
Welcome to Fall 2024! Going forward, we will be publishing only two issues of this newsletter each year to better align with the academic calendar and help you plan to join us for our events.
We especially welcome all the students who have joined our community recently. We have launched a new listserv, especially for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who have expressed interest in bioethics, medical ethics, health and medical humanities, and arts in health. This listerv will provide an important connection for students who might, for example, be pursuing a career in medicine, following an interdisciplinary research interest, curious about what a clinical ethicist does, or simply looking for like-minded peers and colleagues.
An important part of our mission as a University-wide Center is to serve as an educational resource for all students. When we receive information about volunteer or professional opportunities, scholarships, contests, and events that are expressly for students, we want to be able to share that news effectively and efficiently. We are planning future events that will address the interests expressed by students who answered our survey in late 2023.
If you are a student at the U, please join the listserv; we promise to keep the emails streamlined and not too frequent. Faculty and staff, please send us your interested students!
Check back often so you don't miss out on our collaborative events!
FACULTY in the NEWS
Peggy Battin's new book, Sex and the Planet: What Opt-In Reproduction Could Do for the Globe, was published by MIT Press in May 2024.
What if human reproduction were always elective? A prominent bioethicist speculates about the possibilities—and the likely consequences.
A new book by Leslie P. Francis and John G. Francis, 'States of Health: The Ethics and Consequences of Policy Variation in a Federal System,' was published by Oxford University Press in May 2024.
“This book engages with the ethics and consequences of policy variation in a federal system. The book discusses the extraordinary range of policies about health and health care in the US, and the truly shocking differences in health outcomes that are associated with these policy differences. We argue that there are advantages to federalism, including possibilities for experimentation and for avoiding the worst case of national bans on ethically controversial care, but that these advantages will only be realized if people can readily move outside of their home states and if national minimums are achieved.”
Gretchen Case's guest post on "Good Notes," a blog that features expert perspectives from U of U leaders and collaborators, discusses the intersection of the arts, humanities, and healthcare and the work we do at the Center.
Brent Kious appears in an episode of "A State of Mind: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis in Wyoming." A series created by PBS Wyoming to investigate answers to Wyoming's mental health crisis, this documentary series follows patient journeys through a combination of expert interviews and observations from regular people.
Madison Kilbride's research article, titled “Test-Takers’ Perspectives on Consumer Genetic Testing for Hereditary Cancer Risk,” was published in Frontiers in Genetics in July 2024.
Susan Sample’s recently published poems include: "I Dream of a Needle," "Articulate, Please," and "When the Screen Retracts." They will appear later this year in Ars Medica, Canada's first medical humanities journal. Each presents a different perspective—an educator, writer, and daughter—on end-of-life issues.
Leslie Francis’ post on “Bill of Health,” a blog that examines the intersection of health, law, biotechnology, and bioethics highlights Louisiana's new law classifying misoprostol and mifepristone as illegal without a prescription for non-abortion uses, a move that continues to fuel legal debates despite the Supreme Court's recent rejection of a challenge to the FDA's approval of these drugs.
Leslie and John Francis' article, titled "How, and When, Federalism Is Good for Public Health," was published in Harvard Public Health in September 2024.
Susan Sample's lyrical essay, titled "Afterlife," was published in Literature and Medicine in September 2024.
James Tabery and Arthur Caplan's article, titled "Donald Trump Wants to Make Eugenics Great Again. Let's Not," was published in Scientific American in October 2024.