www.hopkinsmedicine.org Open in urlscan Pro
128.220.192.230  Public Scan

Form analysis
4 forms found in the DOM

GET https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/search

<form method="get" id="jhmSiteSearch" action="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/search" _lpchecked="1">
  <div class="search-box">
    <div class="search-field-wrapper">
      <div class="search-field-inner"></div>
      <input name="q" id="search-field" size="30" maxlength="256" title="Enter your search" type="text" aria-label="Enter search" class="ui-autocomplete-input" autocomplete="off">
    </div>
    <button class="bannerSearchButton" name="btnG" type="submit" value="Search">Search</button>
  </div>
</form>

GET https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/search

<form method="get" id="jhmSubSiteSearch" action="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/search" style="display:none;">
  <input type="hidden" name="q" id="subsite-search-field" size="30" maxlength="256">
</form>

Name: physicianThcrstSearch — GET https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/results/search/

<form id="physicianThcrstSearch" class="activeSearch" method="get" action="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/results/search/" name="physicianThcrstSearch">
  <div>
    <input size="30" maxlength="50" id="physQuery" name="query" value="" type="text" class="physicianSearchTextInput ui-autocomplete-input" autocomplete="off" title="search term">
    <input type="submit" value="Go" name="physicianSearchSubmit" class="physicianSearchButton">
  </div>
  <ul id="ui-id-2" tabindex="0" class="ui-menu ui-widget ui-widget-content ui-autocomplete ui-front" style="display: none;"></ul>
</form>

Name: researcherThcrstSearch — GET https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/research/profiles/search

<form id="researcherThcrstSearch" class="activeSearch" method="get" action="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/research/profiles/search" name="researcherThcrstSearch">
  <div>
    <input size="30" maxlength="50" id="rschrquery" name="query" value="" type="text" autocomplete="off" class="physicianSearchTextInput ui-autocomplete-input" title="search term">
    <input type="submit" value="Go" name="expertiseSearchSubmit" class="physicianSearchButton">
  </div>
  <ul id="ui-id-3" tabindex="0" class="ui-menu ui-widget ui-widget-content ui-autocomplete ui-front" style="display: none;"></ul>
</form>

Text Content

Skip Navigation


IMPORTANT UPDATES: COVID-19 VACCINATIONS | RECALL ON PHILIPS RESPIRONICS MEDICAL
DEVICES

COVID-19: We are vaccinating all eligible patients. Learn more:

Vaccines, Boosters & Additional Doses | Testing | Patient Care | Visitor
Guidelines | Coronavirus | Email Alerts

 

Philips Respironics issued a recall for some CPAP and BiLevel PAP devices and
mechanical ventilators. Learn more.



 * Find a Doctor
 * Appointments
 * Login to MyChart

Search

Search

Menu
 * About
    * About Johns Hopkins Medicine
    * Centers & Departments
    * Patient Safety & Quality
    * Maps & Directions
    * News & Publications
    * Commitment to Community
    * For the Media
    * Careers
    * Contact Us
    * Make a Gift
    * Hopkins Medicine Home
   
   I WANT TO...
   
    * Find a Doctor
    * Request an Appointment
    * Refer a Patient
    * Apply for a Job
    * Make a Gift
    * Pay My Bill

 * Health
    * Health Home
    * Conditions and Diseases
    * Treatments, Tests and Therapies
    * Wellness and Prevention
    * Caregiving
   
   I WANT TO...
   
    * Find a Doctor
    * Request an Appointment
    * Pay My Bill
    * MyChart Login

 * Patient Care
    * Patient Care Home
    * Health Information
    * Conditions and Diseases
    * Locations
    * For Health Professionals
    * International Patients
    * Health Seminars
    * MyChart
    * Patient Education
   
   I WANT TO...
   
    * Find a Doctor
    * Request an Appointment
    * Refer a Patient
    * Find Patient Care Locations
    * Attend a Health Seminar
    * Pay My Bill
    * Search Clinical Trials
   
   FIND A DOCTOR
   
   Find a doctor at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical
   Center or Johns Hopkins Community Physicians.
   
   
    * 
    * 
    * Español
    * Português

 * Research
    * Research Home
    * Advancements in Research
    * Research Topics
    * Research Centers
    * Core Facilities
    * About Our Faculty
    * Resources
    * Events Calendar
   
   I WANT TO...
   
    * Search Clinical Trials
    * Search Core Facilities
    * Find Research Faculty
    * View Calendar
    * Make a Gift
   
   FIND RESEARCH FACULTY
   
   Enter the last name, specialty or keyword for your search below.
   
   
 * School of Medicine
    * School of Medicine Home
    * Students
    * Faculty
    * Residents & Fellows
    * Health Professionals
    * Alumni & Friends
    * Schools
    * Departments
    * Institute for Nursing
    * Apply For Admissions
   
   I WANT TO...
   
    * Find a Faculty Director
    * Apply for Admission
    * Take CME Courses
    * Apply to Graduate Medical Education
    * Read Hopkins Medicine Magazine
    * Make a Gift
    * Submit a Kudos Announcement
   
   APPLY FOR ADMISSION
   
    * M.D. Program
      
    * M.D./P.H.D. Program
      
    * Graduate Programs
      
    * Allied Health Professionals
      


HOPKINSMEDICINE

2016-2019 ArchivesBack to Publications

Contents+

Fall 2018


 * FEATURES
   
   * Back to the Brink
   * Musicians on Call
   * Bioethics Gets Practical
   * On the Shoulders of Giants
   * In Rare Form


 * DEPARTMENTS
   
   * Circling the Dome
   * Hopkins Reader
   * Class Notes
   * Medical Rounds


 * FORUM
   
   * Post-Op
   * Second Opinion
   * Letters


 * WEB EXCLUSIVES
   
   * Videos

 

Features


BIOETHICS GETS PRACTICAL


GRADUATES OF THE BERMAN INSTITUTE’S NEW MASTER’S PROGRAM APPEAR TO BE HOT
COMMODITIES, AS EMPLOYERS—FROM INDUSTRY TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES—AIM TO BRING A
MORE ETHICAL LENS TO THEIR WORK.

By Rosemary Hutzler Raun

Illustration by Stephanie Dalton Cowan

“Research always tends to hide behind the claims of objectivity—‘we’re just
doing what the research says’—but bioethics makes it clear, and has made it
clear to me in the process of taking the master’s, that that’s just not the
case.”

Cameron Okeke





As a field, bioethics has long been known for nurturing big thinkers within the
academy who engage in changing health practice and policy to make both more
ethical.

In recent years, however, the field has embarked on a parallel path that is more
practical. “Today you find people who are essentially working day to day in
institutional settings to make their local environment more ethical,” says Ruth
Faden, founding director emerita of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of
Bioethics. “It’s an exciting and important development: Bioethics is
contributing at the granular level to advancing and improving the ethics of
where health care is delivered, where research is conducted, where drugs and
biologics are manufactured, and where governments are implementing policies.”

Enter the new master’s program in bioethics offered by the Berman Institute, in
collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Launched
in 2015, the six-term program provides training in ethics (or moral philosophy)
and the foundations of the modern field of bioethics, as well as courses in
applied bioethics taught by some 35 faculty members from across the university’s
schools of medicine, public health, nursing, international studies, and arts and
sciences.

While bioethics training has traditionally served to complement a career in
medicine or law, the M.B.E.’s first graduating cohort consisted exclusively of
previous bachelor’s-level students who have gone on to gainful employment using
their ethical training, notes program director Travis Rieder.

“It’s a small sample size [of four],” he says, “but if the trend holds, it shows
there’s a need and desire among employers—among nongovernmental organizations,
in research, in policy, in government and in industry”—to hire those he calls
the “seriously ethically informed.”

Meet three newly minted bioethicists, and one in training, who are already
making their marks.


THE RESEARCH ANALYST

The presence of an ethicist on staff can alter the culture of a workplace, says
Cameron Okeke, M.B.E. ’17, now a research analyst in the Justice Policy Center
at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., where he researches policing,
community safety and gun violence prevention. Okeke says his ethics training
allows him to maintain a critical perspective and to give voice to moral
concerns about the work.

 “I do a lot of work on policing, and often we’ll talk about, ‘What is the
destiny of policing? What should happen with policing in America?’” he says. “I
don’t think I’d be able to have that conversation about what’s ‘good policing’
or what’s ‘good research’ or good anything if I didn’t have an ethics background
to be able to say, ‘We have to define what we mean by good.’

“There are [many different ways] to define what’s good; there are utilitarian
ways, there are deontological ways of defining good, there are virtue ethics
ways of defining good—and these philosophical questions are relevant.”

One of Okeke’s missions is the “democratization” of the research process, which
advocates for communities to conduct research on themselves to fulfill their own
articulated purposes, rather than the more traditional dynamic, in which, he
says, “the subject or subjects are acted upon and knowledge is generated solely
for the use of the researcher.”

“Research always tends to hide behind the claims of objectivity—‘We’re just
doing what the research says’—but bioethics makes it clear, and has made it
clear to me in the process of taking the master’s, that that’s just not the
case,” says Okeke. “We know from Tuskegee [and other experiments] that there are
ways that you can do things that are ‘just gathering information’ that are
unethical. There are clear moral arguments about what is better, what is more
effective, what is good research, who are we trying to help, who are we not
trying to help, what is a just way to go about doing research.”

His work at the Urban Institute includes creating logic models for criminal
justice programs, leading community-based research methodologies, designing
workshops that democratize data, and implementing various types of data
collection and analysis, with an overall focus on reduction of harm among
vulnerable populations.

In an article he authored for the think tank on the subject of private police,
he called on ethical arguments about transparency, accountability and fairness
to argue that private police are, by definition, a threat to public safety. “The
bioethics component of my work lies in the research ethics that I champion and
the lens through which I analyze data,” Okeke says. “To be honest, that work is
not often captured in graphs because my ethics training informs how and why we
do our work.

“The conversation about ‘What is our best, and what does that look like?’ and
‘How do we talk about those values and goals?’ within a field is extremely
difficult for people who are kind of in it,” says Okeke. “I’m always one foot
out of it because that’s how I maintain my ability to look at the larger
picture.”


THE NEUROETHICIST

 

Iris Coates McCall

Iris Coates McCall, M.B.E. ’17, was presenting her master’s thesis at a poster
session at the International Neuroethics Society annual meeting in November 2017
when the society’s president, Judy Illes, stopped by to find out more about her
work.

Illes, a noted professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia and
director of Neuroethics Canada (formerly the National Core for Neuroethics), was
so impressed by what she heard that she went on to hire Coates McCall to be a
project coordinator and lead researcher at the core.

Illes’ studies focus on the ethics of wearable technologies in the workplace and
on first-in-human neurosurgical trials that are part of a Pan-Canadian
Neurotechnology Ethics Collaboration, which joins research in neuroethics at UBC
and Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

She says she had fully intended to hire a postdoctoral fellow, but Coates
McCall’s “exceptional training” at the Berman Institute and her knowledge base,
which spans both genetics and neurotechnologies, made her “a remarkably perfect
fit for the research needs of the consortium.”

Coates McCall studied neuroscience as an undergraduate at McGill University, but
she often found that her science courses left off precisely where things started
to get most interesting to her—such as implications for treatment or
communicating findings to a general audience.

At Berman, her thesis examined the ethical issues surrounding the sale of
electroencephalogram monitoring technology to the public, a growing industry.
The devices now being sold are unregulated, both in their marketing, which touts
unsubstantiated therapeutic benefits, she notes, and in the sale and third-party
use of consumers’ neurodata, collected online and potentially containing
biomarkers for neurological conditions such as epilepsy, sleep apneas,
alcoholism and depression.

Comparing the situation with direct-to-consumer genetic testing, which is
regulated, Coates McCall argued that neurotechnology has important differences
in both the nature of the data generated and cultural beliefs about the
information. These differences raise distinct ethical problems, such as the
kinds of spurious therapeutic claims that can be made and the implications for
the user’s sense of self.

Based today at UBC in Vancouver, Coates McCall travels frequently for the
neuroethics Core to Toronto, where she conducts the empirical component of
research on novel brain surgeries with patients and clinicians. As part of her
role, she also produces guidance on neurotechnologies for a major provincial
workplace safety organization.


THE BUDGET EXAMINER

 

“Often, you’ll find that the policymakers who are working through these issues
actually are bringing in ethics but not using words that are familiar to
bioethicists, and vice versa.”

Farnoosh Faezi-Marian



As a program examiner for the White House Office of Management and Budget,
Farnoosh Faezi-Marian, M.B.E. ’17, works most closely with American Indians and
Alaska Natives through the Indian Health Service, which falls under the
Department of Health and Human Services. She is responsible for addressing
challenges related to the provision of quality care, access to care, and the
recruitment and retention of qualified health professionals.

“As part of my role, I’m a career government employee,” says Faezi-Marian. “We
serve our political leaders in trying to bring them the full picture of any
situation. That often involves ethical analysis around allocation of funds and
how policies will play out in application to special populations.”

In trying to create policies, she needs to keep in mind and call upon ethical
frameworks. “At the same time, my primary role is not to be the bioethicist on
staff; ultimately, I’m a budget examiner,” she explains.

“So while I do have specific topics I work on that lend themselves more
fruitfully to ethical deliberation exercise, I don’t always have the opportunity
to put that exercise front and center in my analysis—which I personally find
frustrating because I feel that everyone should be trained in ethics before
making decisions that impact so many people. But I’m working on getting other
people on board, and it’s catching on.”

Her method of persuasion? “Basically, talking about it all the time,” says
Faezi-Marian. She’s found that the policymakers who are working through these
issues actually are bringing in ethics but not using words that are familiar to
bioethicists, and vice versa. “So it really is trying to share this lexicon with
them and letting them know, ‘Look, you are thinking through this in a way where
you’re trying to draw upon frameworks, but let me give some structure to that
thinking, and maybe you can get to that conclusion a little quicker. Or maybe
you can explore other options that you hadn’t considered.’ That’s ultimately the
goal.”


THE MED STUDENT

 

“In medical school, we had some courses in bioethics with some ethical questions
raised and some amount of debate—and then the course is over, and there’s only
so much you can cover in a one-hour course.”

Sarah Thompson



Sarah Thompson has found that even among clinicians-to-be, the importance of
bioethics may be underestimated. She enrolled in the Berman master’s program in
the summer of 2017, after her third year of medical school at Johns Hopkins.

“In medical school, we had some courses in bioethics with some ethical questions
raised and some amount of debate—and then the course is over, and there’s only
so much you can cover in a one-hour course,” she says. “As we were leaving [one
session], I heard a number of people say, ‘That was really interesting, but in
the end, there is no real truth.’ And I remember thinking, No. Everyone is not
correct. There is an answer. If there was no answer, there would be no point in
doing bioethics.”

Thompson knew as an undergraduate at Hendrix College in Arkansas that she wanted
to be a doctor as well as a bioethicist, and she designed her own
interdisciplinary major. But it was not until she was halfway through medical
school that she learned about the Berman Institute M.B.E. program. With help
from Berman Director of Education Initiatives Gail Geller, a professor at the
school of medicine, Thompson was able to envision a career path combining
clinical practice with an academic focus on bioethics research.

Thompson’s thesis examines the clinical ethics of opioid prescription practices:
How should a provider whose patient presents with pain weigh the responsibility
to alleviate that pain against the risk of addiction and the responsibility to
prevent harm to others besides the patient?

Using a virtue ethics model, she considered the provider’s virtue of
“trustingness” with respect to a patient’s testimony. Studies have revealed wide
variability in prescribing practices within departments, she found, as well as
higher rates of negative outcomes for patients of doctors with more liberal
prescribing practices. To be neither too trusting nor too gullible, she
concluded, providers need more ways to develop their practical wisdom about
prescribing practices. For her practicum this fall, she plans to work alongside
a physician in the Johns Hopkins Blaustein Pain Treatment Center. She is
scheduled to return to her medical school studies in spring 2019.

Looking ahead, if she is able to integrate her own ethical framework into her
practice as a clinician, she says, “I can maintain focus on the idea that each
patient is a person, not a data point.”















Follow Johns Hopkins Medicine

 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * LinkedIn
 * Instagram
 * YouTube
 * Weibo

Contact Information

Contact us or find a patient care location.

Notices & Policies

Notice of Privacy Practices
(Patients & Health Plan Members)

Privacy Statement

Terms & Conditions of Use

Non-Discrimination Notice

 

Language Assistance Available:

 * Español
 * አማርኛ
 * 繁體中文
 * Français
 * Tagalog
 * Русский
 * Português
 * Italiano
 * Tiếng Việt
 * Ɓàsɔ́ɔ̀-wùɖù-po-nyɔ̀
 * Igbo asusu
 * èdè Yorùbá
 * বাংলা
 * 日本語
 * 한국어
 * Kreyòl Ayisyen
 * العربية
 * Deutsch
 * Polski
 * Ελληνικά
 * ગુજરાતી
 * ภาษาไทย
 * اُردُو
 * فارسی
 * हिंदी
 * Deitsch
 * ខ្មែរ
 * 
 * 



© The Johns Hopkins University, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Johns Hopkins
Health System. All rights reserved.