September 6,
2002
Department of Medical Ethics Created
at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
(Philadelphia,
PA) -- Arthur Rubenstein, MBBCh, Executive Vice
President of the University of Pennsylvania for the
Health System and Dean of the School of Medicine, has
announced the creation of a Department of Medical Ethics,
which will provide the academic home for the world-renowned
Center for Bioethics. Arthur Caplan, PhD, the
Emanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics, will
serve as the newly-created department's first Chairman.
The Department of Medical Ethics -- the first to be
dedicated to medical ethics at an academic medical center
-- was created to provide an academic home base for
Penn faculty conducting research on ethical issues in
medicine and the life sciences. The new department --
with fourteen full- and part-time faculty members --
is one of the largest programs of its kind in the world.
It will build on and complement the work of the many
Center faculty who are drawn from a variety of academic
and clinical disciplines. The Department of Medical
Ethics positions Penn Bioethics as the undisputed leader
in bioethics research and its use in the practice of
medicine and life sciences.
Since its establishment in 1994 as an interdisciplinary
unit of Penn's School of Medicine, the Center for Bioethics
has grown -- under Caplan's leadership -- into a world-renowned
educational force, advancing scholarly and public understanding
of ethical, legal, social, and public policy issues
in medicine and the life sciences.
"The Center is Penn's voice of bioethics to the
world," explains Caplan. "It is also the way
the School of Medicine is able to interact on an educational
front with other schools, programs and university units
-- outside the world of medicine -- who are interested
in bioethics, as well as with the community and the
general public. The focus of the Center has not changed.
However, with the increasing number of Bioethics faculty
teaching in Penn's School of Medicine, the rapid growth
of the Masters of Bioethics Program, the undertaking
of an undergraduate program and the future prospect
of a PhD program in Bioethics, it became critical to
have a department home for bioethics at the School of
Medicine."
Caplan's goals for the new department are ambitious:
" ... to use the department to better integrate
bioethics into the Health System and the School of Medicine,
to improve our teaching of residents ... to continue
to expand our undergraduate teaching and opportunities
for internships and to attract philanthropic support
in response to the University's commitment to this new
department."
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