NYU Center for Bioethics

As science, technology, and medicine advance, society will confront new ethical dilemmas at the nexus of public health policy and individual choice. The Master of Arts in Bioethics at the College of Global Public Health provides a strong philosophical foundation for navigating these urgent questions.

Events

Bioethics Colloquium 11/2: L. A. Paul on Transformative Changes

LA Paul
 
Certain types of life experiences can be transformative. By transforming you, they change you, and in the process, they restructure the nature and meaning of your life. L.A. Paul discusses the nature of transformative experience and decision making and shows how exploring its epistemic structure can help us to understand special and distinctive issues that arise when these kinds of life events form and change us. Paul then relates this to informed consent, advance directives, and disability.
 
L. A. Paul works on the nature of time, temporal experience, causation, decision theory, and the self. She discovered the philosophical concept of transformative experience, which concerns the nature of life-defining experiences, epistemic changes, and major life decisions. In 2014, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research on transformative experience, and her 2013 book with Oxford University Press, Causation: A User’s Guide, won the annual book prize from the American Philosophical Association. Her 2014 book with Oxford University Press, Transformative Experience, has received wide acclaim. It was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, translated into Japanese, and named by Cass Sunstein of Bloomberg View as one of the year’s five most important books on human bias and blunders. Her work on transformative experience has also been covered in major media venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, the LA Times Book Review, NPR, and the BBC, and explored artistically, in The Missing Shade of You, a dance and spoken word performance by the Logos Dance Collective, performed in New York City in 2017. She is currently working on a book, under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, about self construction, transformative experience, humility, and fear of mental corruption.
 
Friday, November 2, 2018
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
5 Washington Place, Room 202
New York, NY 10003 
Reception to follow
 

10/12 NYU Center for Bioethics Colloquium: Tom Dougherty and Consent Under Duress

Tom Dougherty Colloquium

Consent can change our moral relationships by granting people new permissions. But it fails to do so when it is invalid. It can be invalidated when it is given under duress, such as when the consent-giver is under a coercive threat. Tom Dougherty discusses why certain forms of duress invalidate consent.

Tom Dougherty is a University Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He is currently a Visiting Research Professor at the University of Tulane. He primarily researches moral and political philosophy.

Friday, October 12, 2018
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

NYU Global Center, Room 388
238 Thompson St
New York, NY 10012

Reception to follow.

This event is open to the public.

RSVP by clicking here

NYU Center for Bioethics Director Matthew Liao to Give Keynote at North American Society for Social Philosophy Conference

This Thursday, July 19, 2018, the NYU Center for Bioethics Director Matthew Liao will be presenting the keynote at the North American Society for Social Philosophy Conference. Two of the Center’s MA candidates, Michael Corbett and John James, will also be presenting papers. For more information, see the North American Society for Social Philosophy website: http://www.northamericansocietyforsocialphilosophy.org/program/.

Guest Speaker Molly Crockett: The Value of Moral Action

Classical models of antisocial behavior propose that violence arises out of a failure of lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) to “put the brakes” on aggressive impulses originating in subcortical regions such as the amygdala and striatum. A new, alternative model proposes that LPFC does not directly inhibit aggressive impulses, but instead flexibly modulates the value of aggressive acts via corticostriatal circuits. This mechanism implies that the moral value of actions is flexibly guided by neural representations of social norms. If norms change, so then do the values that guide actions. Supporting this view, re-framing decisions to harm others as being in service of a noble cause eliminated moral preferences. Implications for models of moral responsibility will be discussed.

Dr. Molly Crockett is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Prior to joining Yale, Dr Crockett was a faculty member at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology and a Fellow of Jesus College. She holds a BSc in Neuroscience from UCLA and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and completed a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship with economists and neuroscientists at the University of Zürich and University College London. For more, visit here. 

4:00 PM-6:00 PM
5 Washington Place, Room 202 New York, NY 10003

Reception to follow

Guest Speaker Bruce Albala: Challenges in the Global Development of Treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease

Dr. Bruce Albala has been working to find a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the related dementias for over 30 years and is currently leading a global AD clinical trial. He has served as a clinical investigator, researcher and in various roles in and supporting the pharmaceutical industry during this time.

The talk will cover practical and theoretical issues on the diagnosis of AD, identifying the proper population, designing the clinical studies and implementing them on a truly global level while identifying the health, legal, business and ethical challenges.

Dr. Bruce J. Albala has extensive experience in both basic and clinical medical research. After receiving his Ph.D. in Biopsychology from Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY) in 1979 he went to Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY) where he was first a research fellow in the departments of Psychiatry and Neurology and later a Clinical Instructor in the Department of Neurology. After a brief period as a visiting scientist at the National Institutes of Mental Health (Bethesda, MD) he joined the clinical research group at Ayerst Laboratories, a division of American Home Products Corporation (New York, NY) in the beginning of 1984. In 1986, Dr. Albala went on to become a principle of American BioInterface Corporation (New York, NY) serving as Vice President of Scientific Affairs and a Director of this innovative bioresearch and medical device company. Dr. Albala joined Clinical Technologies Associates (CTA), Inc. (Elmsford, NY), now Emisphere Technology in 1989 as Vice President and Director of Clinical Research. He was elected to the board of Directors of this publicly held company and served as corporate Secretary. Dr. Albala was responsible for both CTA’s specialty Contract Research Organization (CRO) activities as well as its in-patient and outpatient clinical units. In 1991 Dr. Albala became the president and CEO of CTA Bio Services, Inc. (Elmsford, NY) a CRO company that also conducted both in-patient phase I studies and outpatient clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Albala served as a clinical Investigator in over two dozen pharmaceutical trials. In 1996 Dr. Albala joined Medeva, now a part of UCB. Initially overseeing vaccine development in the U.S. Dr. Albala then became Senior Director of Clinical Operations for Medeva Development’s (MD) North American division and was promoted to Vice President, Clinical Operations for all of MDs world-wide units. Dr. Albala continued to provide clinical and regulatory consulting services to the pharmaceutical and medical device community as president and lead consultant in CNS Bio Services, Inc.

Dr. Albala joined Shionogi USA, Inc. in April 2002. Shionogi – one of the oldest pharmaceutical companies in Japan – was in a joint venture (JV) with GlaxoSmithKline, Inc. Dr. Albala as the Vice President of Clinical Development and Head of the CNS Program set strategy and oversaw all CNS activity for both Shionogi and as the lead CNS representative to the Shionogi-GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals JV. The global programs that Dr Albala was responsible for included Alzheimer’s disease (AD), ataxias, ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke, Parkinson’s disease and a large program in obesity and another in analgesia complications. Dr. Albala joined the Neuroscience Product Creation Unit (PCU) of another major Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai Inc. as an Executive Director of Clinical Development in 2010. His major focus at Eisai is AD and he is the International Project Team Leader (IPTL) for one of the global programs exploring disease modification therapies. As IPTL he guides both the internal and external pre-clinical work in these areas as well as being directly responsible for all clinical activities on a global level and representing the group at AD and neuroscience meetings.

Dr. Albala has made numerous presentations at scientific meetings and has scientific publications in both the basic and clinical sciences and has taught courses in the biological, psychological, pharmacological and neurosciences at Syracuse University, Hunter College (City University of New York) and Cooper Union and has lectured on many industry topics. Dr. Albala has U.S. patents for both medical devices as well as instruments used in clinical research settings.

Friday, December 1, 2017
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
5 Washington Place, Room 302

Reception to follow