April 04, 2025 | BME80G Series: Jonathan LoTempio on Nuremberg moments: bioethics pasts and futures

Friday, April 04, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)

On Friday, April 04 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 Jonathan LoTempio on the foundational aspects of bioethics as it developed in the last 80 years.

A zoom option or recording may be available for members of the campus community who cannot attend in person. Contact Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu) to request access.

Nuremberg moments: bioethics pasts and futures

Bioethics as we understand it today is a product of the rules-based international order. It is a unique field of study because it has been sanctioned or supported at the highest level of government, rather than devolved to specialist agencies. However, this position is changing, offering time for stock-taking and consideration of new futures. In this seminar, we will discuss some pre-World War II antecedents of 20th-century bioethics, the bioethical wilderness from the War and Nuremberg up until the Belmont Report, and the Commission Era from 1974-2016. With this foundation, we will consider the futures of bioethics, public health ethics, and data ethics in light of our newly fractured rules-based order.

Dr. Jonathan LoTiempo Jr, Fellow in Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Genetics and Genomics at Penn Medical Ethics & Health Policy.

Dr. Jonathan LoTempio Jr. is a globally engaged researcher working at the intersection of genomics, bioethics, and international policy. As a postdoctoral fellow in bioethics and human data at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, he studies the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging genomic technologies within an international framework.

LoTempio’s contributions to the field span bioinformatics, science diplomacy, global health, and bioethics initiatives. During his doctoral work, he expanded an extant medical collaboration between researchers in Washington, DC and Kinshasa, DR Congo to include reference genomics projects to enhance diagnostic rates for rare and inherited conditions in sub–Saharan Africa. As a Fulbright Schuman Fellow, he conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria, and United Nations University-CRIS in Bruges, Belgium, where he examined the role of science and technology in international governance with a focus on data sharing. He spent the summer after his Fulbright doing archival research at the UN Office at Geneva in search of the postwar antecedents of open science. Woven through each of these has been a commitment to enhancing ethical research and fundamental study of bioethics.

He has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the US Department of State and the EU Directorate General for Education and Culture through the Belgium-Luxembourg Fulbright Commission, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, San Francisco, California, the Clark Family Foundation of Bethesda, Maryland, and the Cosmos Club of Washington, DC.

He holds a BS in biochemistry (University of Rochester) and a PhD in genomics and bioinformatics (George Washington University). Before his academic career, he spent three years working in program management and policy evaluation at the US National Institutes of Health and the Obama White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Readings

Required: bioethical primary sources
  1. Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial PDF (get from instructor)
    1. Section: Judgment – Permissible Medical Experiments (pages 11-14 only, charges on pages 6-11 may be disturbing but instructive)
  2. Obama’s apology to the Guatemalan president 
    1. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2010/10/01/read-out-presidents-call-with-guatemalan-president-colom

Required papers:

  1. The Nuremberg Code at 70 (free online): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2649074
Optional, but very good:
  1. Wikipedia on the rules-based order:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order
  2. Elenor Roosevelt speech on the struggle for human rights at Sorbonne, 1948: https://erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu/struggle-human-rights-1948
  3. Nature article, “Overcoming challenges associated with broad sharing of human genomic data,” bibliography is very good for genomics / data / engineers.

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

June 07, 2023 | BME80G Series: Susan Reverby on “Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and it’s Legacy”

Wednesday, June 07, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map) or Zoom (registration TBD)

On Wednesday, June 07 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Susan Reverby on “Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and it’s Legacy” – a panel discussion will follow.

A zoom option is available for members of the campus community who cannot attend in person. Register for the Zoom link here (TBD).

Susan M. Reverby is Marion Butler McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas; Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Reverby is a historian of American health care, women, race, and public health with a focus on equality and ethics.

June 05, 2023 | BME80G Series: Alexandra Minna Stern on “Eugenics, State Harm, and Reparations in California: An Unfinished History”

Monday, June 05, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map)

On Monday, June 05 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Alexandra Minna Stern on “Eugenics, State Harm, and Reparations in California: An Unfinished History.”

Alexandra Minna Stern is the Humanities Dean and Professor of English and History, and at the Institute for Society and Genetics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Stern founded and co-directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research team that is reconstructing and analyzing the history of eugenics and sterilization in five U.S. states (Michigan, North Carolina, Iowa, Utah, and California).

May 31, 2023 | BME80G Series: Marcy Darnovsky on “Should We Genetically Modify Our Children?”

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Zoom (registration)

On Wednesday, May 31 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Marcy Darnovsky on “Should We Genetically Modify Our Children?” – a panel discussion will follow.

Register for the Zoom link here.

Suggested Reading: Geneva Statement on Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Need for Course CorrectionTrends in Biotechnology, Volume 38, ISSUE 4, P351-354, April 2020.

Marcy Darnovsky, PhD, is Executive Director at the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area that works to bring perspectives grounded in social justice, human rights, and healthy equity to considerations of human genetic and assisted reproductive technologies. She speaks and writes widely on the societal implications of human biotechnologies. Her articles have appeared in scholarly and general-audience publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Nature, and Trends in Biotechnology; she is co-editor of Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics (with Osagie K. Obasogie, University of California Press). She has appeared on dozens of television, radio, and online news shows; and has been cited in hundreds of news and magazine articles. Her PhD is from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

May 15, 2023 | BME80G Series: Hank Greely on “Weird Sh!t: Organoids, Chimeras, and Embryo Models”

Wednesday, May 15, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map)

On Monday, May 15 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Hank Greely on “Weird Sh!t: Organoids, Chimeras, and Embryo Models” – a panel discussion will follow.

Henry T. (Hank) Greely is Professor by courtesy of Genetics, Stanford School of Medicine; Director, Center for Law and the Biosciences; Director, Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society; and Chair, Steering Committee of the Center for Biomedical Ethics. Greely specializes in the ethical, legal, and social implications of new biomedical technologies, particularly those related to genetics, assisted reproduction, neuroscience, or stem cell research.

May 03, 2023 | BME80G Series: Victoria M. Massie on “Of Albert Perry: A Biomythography of Genetic African Origins”

Wednesday, May 03, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map)

On Wednesday, May 03 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Victoria M. Massie on “Of Albert Perry: A Biomythography of Genetic African Origins” – a panel discussion will follow.

More information to follow.

Victoria M. Massie (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Rice University, and a faculty affiliate in the Medical Humanities Program, the Center for African and African-American Studies, and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is broadly interested in the political economy of racialization through emerging biotechnologies that reconfigure the nature of belonging, citizenship, and life itself. Dr. Massie’s expertise sits at the intersection of feminist kinship studies, anthropology of racialization, black feminist bioethics, postcolonial and feminist science studies, vitalism, and biocapitalism, with an area focus on the United States and West/Central Africa. Her latest book project, Sovereignty in Return: The Gift of Genetic Reconnection in Cameroon, examines how the genetic Cameroonian diaspora emerges as speculative capital to facilitate new modes of postcolonial futurity following Cameroon’s 50th anniversary of independence. Dr. Massie received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. A Hurston/Wright Foundation Fellow, Dr. Massie draws on her experience as a nonfiction writer, poet, and former journalist to experiment with ethnographic form.

April 26, 2023 | BME80G Series: Benjamin Hale on “Clean Meat and Muddy Markets: Substitution and Indeterminacy in Consumerist Solutions to Animal Agriculture”

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map)

On Wednesday, April 26 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Benjamin Hale on “Clean Meat and Muddy Markets: Substitution and Indeterminacy in Consumerist Solutions to Animal Agriculture” – a panel discussion will follow.

The hope and promise of synthetic ‘cultured’ meat products is that they will serve as inexpensive substitute proteins that replace meats made by conventional animal agriculture. Where the ethical discussion concerning meat often centers on what is wrong with meat, we instead ask how consumer indifference and producer strategy might influence the uptake of clean meat in the economic market. Rather than approaching the problem in terms of substitution value, we approach the problem of substitution from the standpoint of reasons-for and reasons-against. Doing so, we suggest, exposes complications with “causal indeterminacy” that in turn implicate our thinking both about moral responsibility and the broader nature of technocratic solutions to environmental problems.

Benjamin Hale teaches environmental studies and philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  He works primarily in the area of environmental ethics and environmental policy, though his theoretical interests span much larger concerns in applied ethics, normative ethics, and even metaethics. As for applied questions, much of his recent work centers on ethical and environmental concerns presented by emerging technologies.

April 05, 2023 | BME80G Series: Joseph Graves on “Racism, Not Race: Answers to the most critical questions”

Wednesday, April 05, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Zoom (registration)

Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions by Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman (Columbia University Press, 2023)

On Wednesday, April 05 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Dr. Joseph Graves on “Racism, Not Race: Answers to the most critical questions” – a panel discussion will follow.

Order a copy of Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions!

In advance of Grave’s lecture, the UCSC Genomics Institute’s Racial Justice Learning and Action Group will read Grave’s most recent book, Racism Not Race, Answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Anyone affiliated with UC Santa Cruz is welcome to attend. Click here to add the first meeting to your calendar (must be logged into your UCSC gmail account). The reading schedule is:

  • Wednesday, March 15: Discuss Preface, Introduction, and Chapters 1-3
  • Wednesday, March 22: Discuss Chapters 4-7
  • Wednesday, March 29: Discuss Chapters 8-11 and Conclusions

Contact Mary Goldman about the reading group.

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is a professor of biological science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and a former associate dean for research at the Joint School for Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. He has written extensively on genetics and race including Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia University Press, 2023).