Two different news stories about problems in bioethics caught my eye this week. The Wall Street Journal reports:
"...as the number of hospitals with ethics consulting services has grown in recent years, so have questions about how qualified some of these professionals are to render life-and-death advice. The complex ethical issues arising from new life-prolonging medical technologies are throwing up new challenges. And hospitals face potential legal liability if patients and families feel they haven't been properly counseled or provided with all the information they need to make decisions."
On a quite different theme, Scientific American profiles the problems of one bioethicist at one center. Excerpt:
"When Glenn McGee founded the Alden March Bioethics Institute (AMBI) at Albany Medical College in New York State in 2005, magazine articles and newspaper stories hailed the arrival of the man once described as "Socrates with a beeper." Now, a month after his abrupt departure, former colleagues are painting a complex portrait that suggests the ethicist's own personal and professional relationships may have led to the institute's undoing.McGee remains a tenured professor at AMBI, and neither he nor college officials will discuss the circumstances surrounding his change in status. Former colleagues, however, say the institute began to unravel shortly after his arrival when Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., severed its longtime educational partnership with AMBI's parent medical school and as disillusioned faculty—accusing the ethicist of everything from forgery to spreading insulting rumors—left."