School closure and reopening in light of the COVID-19 pandemic raises critical questions about decision-making in the face of uncertainty, how best to meet the needs of children, how to keep communities safe, and how to generate evidence on each of these issues. In this panel, we’ll hear from leading experts in epidemiology, education, and policy. What do we know about the epidemiology of school opening and closure and what are the most relevant factors to consider? What are the educational impacts of school closure and remote learning and how can negative impacts be minimized? What are the challenges of advising school districts on their responses to the pandemic? Watch this discussion of the ethical implications of each of these questions with Kristen A. Feemster, MD, MPH, MSHPR, FAAP; Jonathan A. Supovitz, EdD, MA; Meredith Matone, DrPH, MHS; and moderated by Holly Fernandez Lynch, JD, MBe. Learn more at improvinghealthcare.net/

In this presentation, Dr. George Yancy argues that whiteness is both an opaque and systemic structure. In short, to be white, to be embodied as white, raises the question not only of white privilege, but the question of white racism and how it is that racism is an insidious phenomenon that is replicated in the lives of white people. We can all agree that white racism is unethical. But what if it is not possible to make a clean exit, as it were, from the bind of whiteness? What if to be white means that one's ethical state, as Peggy McIntosh has suggested, is not completely dependent upon one's ethical will? This raises not only the theme of the unethical structure of whiteness, but the way in which white people (consciously or unconsciously) perpetuate racialized injustice and thereby are unethical.  

George D. Yancy, PhD
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Dr. David Fajgenbaum will share his groundbreaking work to advance precision medicine for Castleman disease, a condition that he is battling as a physician, researcher, advocate, and patient. Combining -omic technologies with machine learning and other bioinformatic tools, Dr. Fajgenbaum has discovered novel predictive biomarkers of treatment response and novel treatment approaches, including one that is saving his life and others. In this REPS lecture, Dr. Fajgenbaum will discuss the ethics of self-experimentation, fairness of resource allocation across rare diseases, and other ethics and policy issues, reflecting on his own personal journey and research.

David C. Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine

Nudges are subtle changes to the choice environment that can have an outsized impact on our decisions and behaviors.  Electronic health records have been rapidly adopted by health systems and clinicians, however there exist hidden nudges which are often misaligned with clinician and patient goals. The Penn Medicine Nudge Unit is the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within the operations of a health system and focuses on working with health system leadership and frontline clinicians and staff to design, test, and implement nudges to improve the delivery of health care. This presentation will provide a background on the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit and provide examples of past project and their ethical implications.

Mitesh S. Patel, MD, MBA
Ralph Muller Presidential Associate Professor, Perelman School of Medicine

Dr. Meyer is Associate Professor of Medicine and directs the Center for Translational Lung Biology at Penn. A translational scientist, she and her team pivoted their ongoing sepsis cohort study to enroll moderately and severely ill patients hospitalized with COVID-19 into an observational molecular study that is yielding insights into the varied host immune response incited by SARS-CoV2. She is also involved in several clinical trials for COVID-19 subjects. This lecture will highlight policy decisions and ethical concerns that arose both early in the pandemic, while clinical care was highly uncertain, and issues that persist as the pandemic evolves. Dr. Meyer will attempt to balance the clinician’s perspective as a critical care doctor, the researcher’s desire to maximize and disseminate knowledge, and the administrator’s concerns about justice, transparency, and safety.

Nuala J. Meyer, MD, MS
Associate Professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
 

In recent years, an increasing number of intraoperative neuroscience studies have been supported by the NIH through the BRAIN initiative. Some of these studies take advantage of intraoperative situations—such as Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery—to advance basic neuroscience knowledge. However, the use of neurosurgical patients as human research subjects raises important ethical considerations, particularly regarding informed consent and undue influence, as well as subjects’ motivations for participation. In this talk, I will present results from a recent empirical study that examined these considerations and assessed informed consent recall in Parkinson’s disease patients who participated in an intraoperative neuroscience study at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anna Wexler, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine
 

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, signed into law on June 22, 2009, gives the United States Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of tobacco products. Regulation occurs with a goal of improving the nation’s health, and must be supported by the best and most current scientific evidence and research. In September 2018, the NIH and FDA funded a second round of Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science (TCORS). Dr. Andrew Strasser is Principal Investigator of the UPenn TCORS, and with colleagues across Penn, Rutgers, Georgetown and Wake Forest Universities, conducts tobacco policy focused research on the advertising, marketing, labeling, use and exposure of combustible tobacco products. He will present his research on nicotine product standards, tobacco advertising, and packaging warning labels that inform tobacco control and regulatory science. 

Andrew A. Strasser, PhD
Research Professor of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine  
 

Research funding bodies in Europe and North America increasingly encourage or require grantees to engage patients not simply as research participants but as partners in all phases of research from topic generation to the dissemination of study results. Patient engagement has been said to improve the relevance, quality, and impact of research, but evidence of these benefits remains limited. This presentation will explore some of the challenges of evaluating the effects of patient engagement in research and also consider the argument that patient engagement in research is intrinsically justified regardless of its effects.

Matthew McCoy, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
 

The most common way for people in the United States to get access to investigational medical products is by participating in clinical trials. For patients who are unable to participate in clinical trials but who wish to try an experimental drug, device, vaccine, or other medical product, there are two pathways that permit non-trial access to products that are still in clinical development and not approved for any use. These are Expanded Access, which has existed for several decades, and Right to Try, which is much newer. Alison Bateman-House will compare and contrast the two pathways and explain why Expanded Access is preferable to Right to Try, both for patients and for the companies whose investigational products will be involved in such “compassionate use” attempts. She will underscore that the existence of such regulatory pathways are necessary but far from sufficient for patients to be able to use experimental medical products outside of clinical trials and highlight what other obstacles, real and perceived, reasonable and unreasonable exist.

Alison Bateman-House, PhD, MPH, MA
Assistant Professor, Division of Medical Ethics
New York University Langone Medical Center
 

Commentary by Robert Vonderheide, MD, DPhil
John H. Glick Abramson Cancer Center Professor, Perelman School of Medicine

The challenges of balancing scientific rigor and ethical concerns in community-engaged research are unique and complex. Ethical issues can arise in terms of methodology, research implementation, and practical aspects of community-based research. This talk will introduce ethical issues related to communities/stakeholders, research participants, and professional relationships with illustrations from case studies and an introduction to useful resources.

Karen Glanz, PhD, MPH
George A. Weiss University Professor
Perelman School of Medicine and School of Nursing


 

Supplemental readings and commentary:

• Reardon, J. The Postgenomic Condition.
• Yudell, M. et al. Taking race out of human genetics.
• Sirugo, G. et al. The missing diversity in human genetic studies.

Sarah Tishkoff, PhD
David and Lyn Silfen University Professor,
Departments of Genetics & Biology, Perelman School of Medicine

Commentary by Kellie Owens, PhD
Fellow, Medical Ethics & Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine

 

Do you think institutional review boards (IRBs) “work”? What does that mean and how would we know? It turns out that evaluating IRB quality and effectiveness beyond superficial measurements related to compliance and efficiency is remarkably challenging. Nonetheless, it is essential to determining whether the system’s overall benefits outweigh its burdens, as well as what adjustments might be in order. In this lecture, Holly Fernandez Lynch describes the problem and introduces several novel approaches currently being pursued by the Consortium to Advance Effective Research Ethics Oversight (AEREO).

Holly Fernandez Lynch, JD, MBe
John Russell Dickson, MD Presidential Assistant
Professor of Medical Ethics, Medical Ethics & Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine

 

The controversy about the gene edited babies in China happens to have coincided with increasing tensions between the US and China and intensified competition in the life sciences, including legal action against some Chinese scientists based in the US. In this talk I sketch out the background geopolitical issues that have received little attention but that provide context for the regulation of CRISPR and related technologies.

Jonathan D. Moreno, PhD
David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics,
Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine



 

Informed consent for clinical research in the context of acute and emergent illness is widely recognized as challenging and is often not possible. There is, however, a wide spectrum of acute and emergent conditions and a similarly wide range of potential for patients and surrogates to engage in decisions about research enrollment. Dr. Dickert will focus on research designed to understand and integrate patients’ and surrogates’ perspectives on consent for clinical trials in the context of acute myocardial infarction and stroke. He will argue that involving patients and surrogates in enrollment decisions in many emergency situations is not pointless despite important limitations that must be recognized.


Neal Dickert, MD, PhD, FACC
Assistant Professor, Emory University School of Medicine
Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, ECCRI
Emory University Rollins School of Public Health,
Department of Epidemiology, Emory Center for Ethics

Commentary by Benjamin S. Abella, MD, MPhil, FAHA
Professor and Vice Chair for Research
Director, Center for Resuscitation Science
Department of Emergency Medicine
Perelman School of Medicine