Teaser! Parr/Bioethics Joint Lecture Series: Maggie Little

Dr. Maggie Little will be giving a talk on January 28th as part of the Parr Center and the UNC Center for Bioethics’ joint lecture series. Dr. Little’s talk is titled “ A Plea for Translational Ethics”.

Dr. Little is Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Her research has spanned many topics including issues in reproduction, clinical research ethics, data ethics, and the structure of moral theory.

In her Kennedy Institute of Ethics talk, Dr. Little said “Bioethics looks at ethical issues that arise in virtue of our bioethical nature”. Translational ethics function as an integral part of bioethics that deals with the advancement of knowledge in medicine and science and the transfer of this theoretical knowledge into practice.

Translational ethics, most generally, focuses on “bringing ethical scholarship into the sphere of personal and public action” (Cribb 1). In healthcare, translational research can be viewed as research on human specimens, whose findings may inform basic science research and lead to a transfer of the results towards clinical therapeutics and novel healthcare policies… (Hostiuc 1).

In other words, translational research in medicine requires researchers to identify the steps to transfer basic scientific discoveries into clinical practice, all the while working within ethical constraints. The importance of these translational ethics is that most philosophical work in ethics has not been obliged to identify the steps to translate theoretical conclusions into adequate practice.

Questions of ethics and morality can be found in personal and public life, in all levels of society. Ethics applied in society tend to apply a certain standard to the treatment of human beings. In the world of bioethics, transitional ethics aim to ensure a similar outcome: to ensure that advancements made in science are ethically applied in practice and that there is a certain standard to which this implementation is held to.

Works Cited:

Cribb, Alan. “Translational Ethics? The Theory—Practice Gap in Medical Ethics.” Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 36, no. 4, 2010, pp. 207–210. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20696764. Accessed 17 Jan. 2020.

Hostiuc, Sorin et al. “Translational research-the need of a new bioethics approach.” Journal of translational medicine vol. 14 16. 15 Jan. 2016, doi:10.1186/s12967-016-0773-4