Biomedical Issues: Science and Technology

Catalog description

This course examines the ethics, conundrums, hopes, and fears associated with biomedicine within Western cultures and societies. For centuries human beings have been interested in the human body and its relationship with the world. With increasing technological intervention and diagnoses, we stand at a threshold of decision-making and procedure use and development. What are appropriate uses for biomedical technologies? Who decides? In a world of limited resources and unlimited imagination, what areas of medicine and biomedical investigations are best pursued, and at what expense to whom? Moving beyond “right and wrong” debates, we will explore the values inherent to the technologies themselves and those who build and utilize them, and examine a variety of views and arguments framing current scholarly debates surrounding these and other crucial questions of biomedicine.