Science and Medical Ethics

Science and Medical Ethics

Includes genetics, forced sterilization, and other science issues.

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"Three Generations of Imbeciles"?

Critics of forced sterilization laws believed that they violated rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. In 1924, eugenicists and their supporters decided to find out if the laws were constitutional. To do so, they needed someone who could challenge the law in the courts. They chose Carrie Buck of Virginia. At the age of 17 years old, she was pregnant and unmarried. Her mother, Emma, an inmate at the Lynchburg Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, was rumored to have been a prostitute.

Publication Readings January 3, 2012

Eugenics and Civic Biology: An Exploration of Buck vs. Bell locked

Lesson Plan February 24, 2008
Eugenics, Race, and Marriage

In challenging students to choose a mate carefully, the author of The New Civic Biology (Reading 1) implied that it was an individual choice. And for some individuals like the young men from Michigan described in the reading, it was. In other parts of the United States, the government had a voice in that decision, as Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter would discover.

Publication Readings January 3, 2012
Finding a Scapegoat When Epidemics Strike

In a New York Times essay titled “Finding a Scapegoat When Epidemics Strike,” Donald G. McNeil Jr. looks at how, throughout history, some group always seems to get blamed for the spread of a pandemic disease. Dr. Liise-anne Pirofski, chief of infectious diseases at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, explained that “ ‘when disease strikes and humans suffer . . . the need to understand why is very powerful.

Facing Today September 29, 2009

From Theory to Classroom: Eugenics and Education locked

Lesson Plan February 24, 2008
Gattaca

107 minutes
Source: Facets

Library Resource December 15, 2009
Imaging Race

In the research article, "Imaging Race" (American Psychologist , Feb-Mar 2005), Stanford University psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt describes how brain imaging reveals "the neurobiological effects of people's racial beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge in a manner that appears to highlight (both to scientists and to laypeople) the socially constructed nature of race.

Facing Today June 6, 2008
In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine

54 minutes
Source: amazon.com

This documentary studies the step-by-step process that led the medical profession in the Third Reich down an unethical road to genocide. It graphically documents the racial theories and eugenics principles that set the stage for the doctors' participation in sterilization and euthanasia, the selections at the death camps, as well as inhuman and unethical human experimentation. It provides the historical basis for many current dilemmas in bio-ethical work.

Library Resource December 15, 2009
Paul Farmer on Preventing Poverty and Disease
Video Clip December 2, 2010
Paul Farmer Talks about People Who Don't Want Help
Video Clip December 2, 2010
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