Ethics in Translational Medicine II - Participant Related Issues

Translational research presents new organizational, ethical, and legal challenges. Equally, it calls for collaboration and communication between different fields of omics, big data analytics, and drug development with attention to the respect for involved participants. This situation calls for a trained ethical attention conscious of professional and personal values.

The course is focused on participant issues. The participants are asked to reflect ethically on him/herself as a researcher engaged in his/her field (touching on values, positions, relations, etc.). Other participant perspectives that can impact the participant will eventually be incorporated in reflections (e.g., colleagues, patients, clinics, labs, objects, animal models, society, etc.). Ethical reflections will be promoted through lectures on translation and law. By using artefacts from Medical Museion participants will also reflect on the ethical issues that these objects represent.

Course objectives

To understand the moral and legal component in translational medical research by:

• Acquiring competencies that will help identify, assess, and resolve ethical and legal questions and provide a conceptual framework for addressing ethical questions
• Ascertaining the interrelationship between ethical issues and the production of translational knowledge
• Developing dialogical competencies that will support the collaborative effort in generating data, developing clinical therapeutics, and improving patient care.