Ruth Faden at the Capstone Event: “Henrietta Lacks: Ethics at the Intersection of Health Care and Biomedical Science”

A number of panelists and speakers will be present at the Go Big Read Capstone Event on April 15-16 at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
On April 15 at 3 pm, keynote speaker Ruth Faden will speak on “Henrietta Lacks: Ethics at the Intersection of Health Care and Biomedical Science.”
Faden is the executive director at Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics, as well as a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. Her research, credentials, and experiences speak to her expertise on ethics in the healthcare and biomedical science fields.
In “Informed Consent and Clinical Research,” a 1996 article for the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Faden states that, “Despite decades of discussion about the theory of informed consent and the moral commitments that underlie it, despite the best reformist efforts on the part of biomedical ethics to put respect for the autonomy of the patient at the core of the medical encounter, the dynamics of illness and the dynamics of the clinic remain, in important respects, unchanged.” Readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks may wonder not only what this means for HeLa, but what it means for patients today.
We look forward to welcoming Faden to campus, and further hearing about her research and experience with these topics, which relate so strongly our community discussion of the ethics of HeLa.
Click here to RSVP for either or both days of the capstone event.