Column from May/June 2001 issue of ASPB News, page 5. Links to supporting material not included in the printed newsletter are provided at the bottom of this page in PDF format.*

"Mokita": The truth we all know and agree not to talk about. Papua New Guinea.

Scenario: Your postdoc is angry about his position as second author on a paper. He thinks he should be first author. Unbeknownst to you, he begins to bad-mouth the lab and you in your department and at national meetings. You hear from colleagues that other postdocs are now hesitant to come to your lab.

"Why is it imperative that I have experience dealing with bioethics? I don’t even know what they are!" This was the conversation in my head as the staff member representing the dean of the medical school asked me to lead a series of discussions on bioethics. What was I going to do, turn down the dean?!

In this column I will try to tell you why, two years later, I am ever so glad that I said yes. Rather than presume to teach you about bioethics, I will use this column to provide resources and share some of the amazing learning, events, and conversations that have ensued from my participation in this series.

Mandated and funded by the National Institutes of Health, The Bioethics Research Initiative (BRI) at the University of Washington (UW) is a series of lectures and small group discussions centered on a variety of topics from authorship to the use of human subjects in research. The lectures are videotaped, and lunch is served at each of the discussion groups run by selected faculty. Every postdoc or student funded by NIH at UW must attend three lectures and three to five of the discussion groups.

To educate its faculty, UW hands out four brief documents of two to four pages each. These give very helpful suggestions about how to lead a discussion, how to use the case studies (like the one I made up at the top of this column) to incite a discussion of bioethical issues, The Hastings Center model for helping a group reach an ethical decision, and "Ethics: A Primer for Non-Ethicists" (The Genetic Resource, 10(1):5–8). Until UW posts the materials they have developed (June 2001), materials I refer to in this column are linked below.*

So I read the material, which was blessedly short and actually interesting. My first session was on mentoring. We introduced ourselves and began to discuss the first case, which involved a conflict between a principal investigator who wanted a student to work during the day and a student who preferred to work at night.

"Dan, what did your group discuss?"

"Well, a similar situation actually happened in my department so we talked about that."

"How was the issue resolved?"

"The student committed suicide."

To be continued…

Dina Mandoli
University of Washington, Seattle
mandoli@u.washington.edu

Supporting materials can be found HERE.