Public lectures are open to the public and no reservation is required.
The Poynter Center Seminar series is intended to foster community and intellectual stimulation among members of the IU community who want to maintain an ongoing relationship with the Poynter Center and each other. I examine the extent to which an ethics committee in a Boston hospital tried to deliberate about policy in an ethically sound way, and to what extent that committee's deliberations departed from moral principles in order to produce a workable consensus. In this paper, I argue that the subject's initial informed consent to participation in a trial cannot overcome a moral problem in the continuation of these trials when the results of interim analyses of clinical endpoint data are withheld from subjects. I propose an alternative experimental design and address the crucial criticism that the proposed design introduces bias into the results, drastically diminishing the prospects of reaching significant conclusions. This paper argues that modern developments in genetics make notions of the doctor-patient relationship obsolete and raise serious questions about the role of patient autonomy.