Bioethics center gets grant for social science research

and Kate Khatib The Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center recently received a grant from the Greenwall Foundation. The grant, designated to support social science research, is for the amount of $307,250. In line with the Center's goal of integrating social science techniques and insights with the analytic methods of bioethics, the grant will be used not only to acquire expertise in the social sciences, but also to fund new research, data analysis and equipment. "Grants designed to create core programs, while common in the life sciences, physical sciences and medicine, are almost unknown in bioethics," said Bioethics Director Arthur Caplan. "With their generous grant, the Greenwall Foundation is making an important and long-lasting contribution to scholarship, teaching and public policy." The Center for Bioethics deals heavily with controversial ethical issues in the medical field. Although it is based in the Medical Center, Caplan said that bioethics is an interdisciplinary field, benefiting from such areas as philosophy, law, social science, and communications. The Center's mission is to advance scholarly and public understanding of ethical, legal, social, and public policy issues in health care. The Center came into existence in mid-1994 when Caplan left his post at the University of Minnesota to head Penn's bioethics effort. Caplan, one of the leading bioethicists in the field, said the purpose of bioethics is to study ethical questions in the sciences -- particularly medicine. Of the 120 medical schools in the nation, about half have bioethics centers. While this will be one of the newer ones, "it is set at one of the first-rate medical schools in the country," according to Caplan. He said there is no other center that has as many assets as the one at the University. The Center was to bring a new perspective to the study of topics such as AIDS, euthanasia and surrogate motherhood. Caplan, himself, has been described by Medical Dean William Kelley as "the most prominent figure in the field of bioethics." Caplan said a key area he would like to pioneer is the integration of social science methods with methods of analysis presently used in bioethics. The Greenwall Foundation provides funding to professionals from various scholarly fields to address issues in bioethics. One of its goals is "to put in place programs which can become self-sustaining; thus continuing to serve the needs of society far beyond the limited terms of our funding."