The University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities
Center for Values in Medicine, Science, & Technology
in conjunction with the School of Behavioral & Brain Sciences
present a UTD Public Forum

“Rethinking Research Ethics”
Dr. Rosamond Rhodes
Professor of Medical Education and Director of Bioethics Education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center

In Professor Rhodes’ view, current protections for research subjects may be excessive and even deny the public of important knowledge and treatments for diseases. A new philosophy for clinical research ethics is needed. In this public forum, Professor Rhodes will present the main features of such a philosophy.

Fabrice Jotterand, Ph.D., assistant professor of philosophy at UTD, and assistant professor of psychiatry (ethics) at UT Southwestern, will introduce the forum with an overview of the ethics of human experimentation. Suzanne Rivera, MSW, assistant vice president of research services at UT Southwestern, will then describe current U.S. Federal regulations on the protection of human participants in research. These two brief lectures provide the background for Professor Rhodes’ talk. A discussion will follow the formal presentations.

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Rosamond Rhodes, Ph.D., received her degree in Philosophy from The Graduate School, CUNY where she specialized in ethics and political philosophy.  Since 1988 she has served on the faculty of Mount Sinai School of Medicine.  She is now Professor of Medical Education and Director of Bioethics Education.  At Mount Sinai she oversees the medical ethics curriculum for the students in all four years of medical school, for house staff in 13 residency programs, for graduate post-doctoral fellows in the biomedical sciences, and for the students in the genetics counseling program.  She directs a program of faculty education and serves as a member of Mount Sinai's Ethics Committees.   Dr. Rhodes is also Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY where she teaches in both the Philosophy Program and the interdisciplinary MALS Program. 

Beyond the teaching setting, Dr. Rhodes serves as editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine and on the editorial boards of the international journals Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Bioethics/Developing World Bioethics, and Clinical Ethics.  Her own writing has focused on the history of moral and political philosophy and on its applications to bioethics.  She has written on the work of Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant and Rawls and addressed a broad range of issues in bioethics including: professionalism, health care distribution, the doctor-patient relationship, surrogate decision making, research ethics, physician-assisted suicide, genetics, cloning, abortion, assisted reproduction, transplantation, psychiatry, and bioethics education.  She is co-editor of Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate (Routledge, 1998),  Medicine and Social Justice: Essays on the Distribution of Health Care (Oxford, 2002) and the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Bioethics.