Prominent bio-ethics professor Tom Beauchamp from Georgetown University will visit USF St. Petersburg to present two lectures – The Future of Physician Assisted Suicide and The Limited Vision of the Belmont Report. Both lectures are free and open to the public.
Wednesday, Jan. 26 at 7 pm in the Campus Activities Center
The Future of Physician-Assisted Suicide will explore the current moral and political issues of physician-assisted suicide, and discuss how law, public policy and moral judgment should evaluate it. Beauchamp will discuss current issues and argue that these decisions should be made by each state and its voters and legislators. Beauchamp claims there is nothing inherently immoral about physician-assisted suicide.
Thursday, Jan. 27 at 10 am in Davis Hall, Room 130
During The Limited Vision of the Belmont Report, Beauchamp will offer a retrospective look at the Belmont Report and discuss its impact. In 1979, Beauchamp was the principal author of the Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. This report sets official policy governing research on human subjects.
This report, which catapulted Beauchamp into prominence, was after the public became aware of a 40-year government-sponsored study of nearly 400 African-American syphilitic men. Researchers had studied the progressive effects of syphilis, without informing the men they had the disease and without offering them treatment when it became available.
Beauchamp is Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Bioethics, Georgetown University. Beauchamp received his Masters from Southern Methodist University, his B.D. from Yale University and his Doctorate in Philosophy from The Johns Hopkins University. He has published more than 100 articles and books and his coauthored work, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, now in its fifth edition from Oxford University Press, is considered the seminal work in the field of bioethics.
Beauchamp has lectured at more than 100 universities on three continents. In 1994, University of Indiana gave him the McDonald-Merrill-Ketcham Memorial Award "for furthering greater understanding and exchange of opinions between the professions of law and medicine."
The lecture is sponsored by the Poynter-Jamison Chair of Journalism Ethics and Press Policy, the Regional Vice Chancellor for Research and Community Partnerships, and the Cole Chair in Ethics.
For more information, please call Hugh LaFollette at 727-553-4830.
