Medical Ethics Division News


February - March 2010

Honors and Appointments

Dr. Joseph Fins Gives John P. McGovern Award Lecture
Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry, gave the 2010 John P. McGovern Award Lecture in the Medical Humanities. His lecture, "The Minimally Conscious State: Gray Matters in Medicine, the Law and Ethics" was given at the Moot Court National Court Competition at the University of Houston Law Center. The McGovern Award Lecture is given annually to a distinguished lecturer by the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. Dr. Fins (right) is receiving the McGovern medallion from William Winslade, PhD, JD, the James Wade Rockwell Professor of Philosophy of Medicine at the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law and Associate Director for Graduate Programs, Health Law & Policy Institute at the University of Houston Law Center.

Dr. Fins Appointed to Europäische Akademie
On March 14, 2010, in Bonn, Germany, Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry, was appointed to the Council of The Europäische Akademie Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler GmbH, Germany in recognition of his work as a member of the "Deep Brain Stimulation in Psychiatry: Guidance for Responsible Research and Application."

Comment by Dr. Joseph Fins Selected as New York Times "Quotation of the Day"
A quotation from Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry, that appeared in a February 4, 2010 front page article in The New York Times was selected as the newspaper’s “quotation of the day.” In response to a New England Journal of Medicine study demonstrating the capability of functional neuroimaging to improve the diagnosis of patients in the minimally conscious and vegetative states and to establish communication channels with patients thought unreachable, Dr. Fins said, “We’ve opened up a communication channel with this technique, but in some ways it’s like a very bad cellphone connection.” (Please see Media and Publicity section for more.)

Lectures, Presentations, and Events

Dr. Joseph Fins Presents Invited Talk at World Congress on Brain Injury

Photo by Bud Glick

Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry, presented an invited talk, "The Ethics of Disorders of Consciousness" on March 12, 2010, at the Eighth World Congress on Brain Injury of the International Brain Injury Association in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Joseph Fins Serves on Panel for Cornell Campaign
Dr. Fins also served on a faculty panel entitled “A Meeting of the Minds: Decoding Our Decisions” at Big Red by the Bay in San Francisco on March 18, 2010 as part of Far Above… The Campaign for Cornell. Dr. Fins was joined by other faculty from the Ithaca campus in the session moderated by Daniel Huttenlocher, PhD, Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science.

Dr. Nicholas Schiff Gives Keynote Address at WCMC Medical Student Research Day
Nicholas D. Schiff, MD, Associate Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience and Public Health, presented the Keynote Address at the Weill Cornell Medical Center Medical Student Research Day on February 24 in the Uris Auditorium. The title of his talk was “Conscious or not? How the emerging science of recovery of consciousness after severe brain injuries may impact more than you think today.”

Publications

Entire Issue of Technology in Society Devoted to C.P. Snow Lecture Series
Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry; and Inmaculada de Melo-Martín, PhD, MS, Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Medical Ethics, were guest editors of a special issue of Technology in Society (Volume 32, Issue 1, January 2010) exploring the legacy of C.P. Snow on the 50th anniversary of his landmark book, Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. C.P. Snow was a British novelist and physicist who wrote about the divide that separates the sciences and humanities. The issue was based on the 2008-2009 Division of Medical Ethics Seminar Series, which addressed Snow’s legacy to the academy in general and to bioethics in particular. Many of the issue’s contributors—scholars from a variety of academic disciplines--were speakers at the seminar series. In addition to their jointly authored introduction, “C.P. Snow's ‘Two Cultures’ fifty years later: An enduring problem with an elusive solution,” Drs. Fins and de Melo-Martín authored two additional papers. Dr. de Melo Martín provided an analysis of the volume in her essay, “The Two Cultures: An Introduction.” Dr. Fins authored “C.P. Snow at Wesleyan: Liberal Learning and the Origins of the ‘Third Culture,’” an intellectual history of Snow, his work and his times as seen through the prism of his visit to Wesleyan University in 1961. The anthology includes essays by David J. Skorton, MD, President of Cornell University; Philip Kitcher, PhD, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University; Stephen R. Latham, JD, PhD, Deputy Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University; Stephen G. Post, PhD, Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University; Rodney W. Nichols, a consultant on science and technology policy; and Bruce Jennings, MA, Senior Consultant and Fellow at The Hastings Center and Lecturer in Public Health in the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Dr. Fins is co-author of JAMA commentary on Neuroethics and Publication of Deep Brain Stimulation Trials

Photo by Bud Glick
Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College co-authored a commentary with Dr. Thomas Schlaepfer, Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Dean at the University Hospital, Bonn, Germany and member of the Department of Psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In their essay, "Deep Brain Stimulation and the Neuroethics of Responsible Publishing: When One is Not Enough," which appeared in the February 23rd issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the authors propose ethical norms for publication of deep brain stimulation (DBS) results and call for a registry of all DBS studies to avoid biases that might arise from the selective publication of positive and single subject results. Dr. Fins and Dr. Schlaepfer's collaboration has been underwritten, in part, by an unrestricted grant of the Volkswagen Stiftung, Hanover, to the Europäische Akademie Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler GmbH and the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Bonn. Support is for a project entitled, "Deep Brain Stimulation in Psychiatry, Guidance for Responsible Research and Application," chaired by Professor Schlaepfer and of which Dr. Fins is a member. Professor Fins also received partial grant support from the Weill Cornell Medical College Ethics Core and the NIH CTSC grant UL1-RR024966. 

Dr. Inmaculada de Melo-Martín Co-Authors Article on Social Aims of Research
An article titled Social Values and Scientific Evidence: The Case of the HPV Vaccine by Inmaculada de Melo-Martín, PhD, MS, Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Medical Ethics, and Kristen Intemann, PhD, of the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University, was recently published in Biology and Philosophy, 25(2) (2010): 203–213. Using the case of the recently developed HPV vaccines, the authors argue that the social aims of research can play important roles in justifying decisions about how research problems are defined in drug development, evidentiary standards used in testing drug “success,” and clinical trial methodology. As a result, attending to the social aims at stake in particular research contexts will produce more rational methodological decisions as well as more socially relevant science.

Media and Publicity

Drs. Joseph Fins and Nicholas Schiff Quoted in Response to Article on Diagnosing Severely Brain Injured Patients

Photo by Bud Glick

Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Medicine in Psychiatry, was widely quoted in response to a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrating the capability of functional neuroimaging to improve the diagnosis of patients in the minimally conscious and vegetative states and to establish communication channels with patients thought unreachable. He was featured in a front page article in The New York Times and its Week in Review as well as New Scientist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other national outlets. His comment on February 4th -- “We’ve opened up a communication channel with this technique, but in some ways it’s like a very bad cellphone connection.”-- was chosen by The New York Times as its "Quotation of the Day." His quote in a February 15 Los Angeles Times article was also featured in the weekly online Cornell Chronicle.

Nicholas D. Schiff, MD, Associate Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience and Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Medical Ethics, was also widely quoted in response to the New England Journal of Medicine article, describing the findings as a major step forward. Among the publications in which he is quoted are The New York Times, The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, ScienceNow and New Scientist. In the Washington Post article, he says, “This should change the way we think about these patients. I think it's going to have very broad implications." He was also interviewed by BBC radio.

Dr. Fins in Fall 2009 and Winter 2009/10 issues of Weill Cornell Medicine
Page 8 of the Fall 2009 issue mentioned Dr. Fins' election to the American Osler Society. Page 10 of the Winter 2009/10 issued mentioned Dr. Fins' election as president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

Welcome New Faculty

Bruce Jennings, MA, has been appointed Lecturer in Public Health (Courtesy) in the Division of Medical Ethics. Mr. Jennings is one of the nation’s foremost bioethicists. He has served at the Hasting Center in a number of positions since 1980, and in 2007, he was elected to fellowship at the Hasting Center. This is the highest honor that can be bestowed on a bioethicist. Since 2006 he has directed the Center for Humans and Nature in New York City. Mr. Jennings is a magna cum laude graduate from Yale University, and he received his MA from Princeton University. He is the author of approximately 60 peer reviewed articles, 9 co-authored books and 12 edited volumes, as well as numerous book chapters and other publications. He has also had a number of teaching positions, including at Princeton, Stockton State College, SUNY Purchase, Vassar College, and Columbia School of Journalism. Since 1995 he has been a lecturer in the School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale. Mr. Jennings has also served on a number of important panels and commissions dealing with health policy. In the Division of Medical Ethics, he will assist Dr. Fins with strategic planning, participate in annual seminars, present as a guest lecturer, collaborate on special projects, and continue his participation as a member of the Hospital’s Ethics Committee.

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