MEDICINE : Institute Wrestles With Thorny Ethical Issues
Suppose that genetic research advances to the point where a doctor can predict that a 25-year-old mother will contract breast cancer.
How should the doctor tell her? What if the patient wants more children? Is the information confidential, or should she tell her employer and insurance company?
This week, the City of Hope National Medical Center opened the Institute for Applied Health Care Ethics as a place to wrestle with such thorny questions. The institute, on the City of Hope’s 100-acre Duarte campus, will bring together scientists, ethics scholars, doctors and others to debate the ethics of gene therapy and other medical breakthroughs, said director Rabbi Norman T. Mendel.
“We want to put human values on the same level as progressive science and advanced medicine,” Mendel said.
City of Hope officials have talked about setting up an ethics institute as medical advances continue to raise ethical questions, Mendel said. The institute will be funded by the City of Hope, but will seek other funding through foundations and corporate grants.
Mendel said that within the next few years the institute’s funding needs will exceed $1 million.
The institute will sponsor regional, national and international conferences on medical ethics. Its first event, a five-day conference on gene therapy, opened Sunday.
City of Hope, a cancer hospital and research center, is a leader in the field of gene therapy. In 1992, the hospital opened the Center for Gene Therapy with a $3-million grant from the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute.
