Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 28, 2016—On Tuesday, April 12, Williams College will host its annual Weiss Lecture on Medicine and Medical Ethics at 7 p.m. in Griffin Hall, room 3. This year’s lecture will be delivered by Udo Schuklenk, professor of philosophy and Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. The event is free and open to the public.
During the 2015 Ebola outbreak, international medical humanitarian aid organizations wrestled with the question of whether they should offer experimental medical interventions to patients in emergency medical centers. Schuklenk spent several weeks in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the outbreak, trying to develop an ethics framework that could provide guidance. In his Weiss Lecture address, titled “Catastrophic Illness and Access to Experimental Medical Interventions: Revisiting the 2015 Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak,” Schuklenk will discuss the ethical quandries concerning informed consent in epidemic situations, prioritizing patients in randomized placebo-controlled trials over those requiring immediate emergency access, and relying on results from non-human primate experiments to treat humans.
Schuklenk is the joint editor-in-chief of Bioethics, the journal of the International Association of Bioethics, and the founding editor of Developing World Bioethics. From 2009 to 2011 he chaired an international expert panel on end-of-life decision making on behalf of the Royal Society of Canada. He is an author or editor of seven books and more than 150 articles in peer reviewed journals and anthologies. His most recent journal contributions include papers in the American Journal of Public Health on mandatory HIV testing and in the Journal of Medical Ethics on religious symbols in doctors’ rooms. Schuklenk holds a Ph.D. from Monash Univeristy in Melbourne, Australia.
The Weiss Lecture is an annual event sponsored by the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences that memorializes the life and work of the late Andrew B. Weiss ’61 and his wife Madge Weiss. It promotes discussion of health care, including the economics of health care as well as biomedical and ethical issues.
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Published March 28, 2016
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