May 16, 2025 | BME80G Series: Benjamin Capps on A One Health Guide to Bioethics

Friday, May 16, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm

VIRTUAL (flyer)

On Friday, May 16 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Benjamin Capps.

A One Health Guide to Bioethics

One Health connects the health of non-human animals and human beings to the environments they share. The relationships are seen in the natural origins of zoonotic pandemics, which can be explained through animal welfare, conservation, ecology, as well as public health. My work in bioethics attempts to define these connections. However, I am often told that it’s all very well to define one health ethics, when all that is needed is a pragmatic, or practical ideal of the one health approach. My response is that ethics is embedded in pragmatism, and you can’t escape ethical dilemmas by just being practical. Moreover, by avoiding hard environmental questions, a one health approach often becomes a justification for public health. Public health is anthropocentric and has no regard for the interests of animals or the non-human environment; in practice, it often excludes ethical conservation, ecology, and environmentalism. In this seminar, I will define one health ethics, and try to answer (maybe) some hard questions using actual cases. The objective is to appreciate that being practical (doing science or doing public health) is an inherently bioethical endeavour.

Benjamin Capps, Associate Professor, Department of Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.

Benjamin Capps is is an associate professor in the Department of Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University. Before moving to Canada in 2014, he was a member of faculty at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore (2008-2014). Since 2017, Ben has chaired the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) Committee on Ethics, Law and Society. He has published One Health Environmentalism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Contested Cells: Global Perspectives on the Stem Cell Debate (co-editor, Imperial Collage Press, 2010), and Addiction Neurobiology: Ethical and Social Implications (with others, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2009). In 2024, he was awarded a grant to lead a residential workshop at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, on The Ecological Genome Project and the Promises of Ecogenomics for Society. He is a member of the Humanimal Trust’s scientific committee (registered charity, UK, since 2022), and served on the Neuroethics Working Group of the Bioethics Advisory Committee (Singapore; 2011-2014), and Pro-Tem National Oversight Committee for Human-Animal Combinations in Stem Cell Research (Ministry of Health, Singapore; 2011-2012). He has been an advisor for the World Health Organisation, World Federation for Animals, Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission, and UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

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