No easy answers: Stanford Medicine magazine delves into world of bioethics

(PhysOrg.com) -- The spring issue of Stanford Medicine magazine explores the discipline of bioethics, which was spurred into being in the 1970s when several medical issues stirred up public controversy.

As the man cut the umbilical cord between his wife and their first child, the nurse at his side said, “Huh.” The sound filled him with foreboding. When he recalls the moment, he still sees the nurse looking between his baby’s legs, and he still hears that toneless voice.

The newborn’s genitalia could have been identified as male, female or something in between. The doctors needed a few days to figure out what had happened — an endocrine disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia — and determine that the baby was, in fact, a girl.

It’s almost always a shock for parents and for medical staff when a child comes into the world with ambiguous genitalia, which is estimated to occur with one in every 1,000 to 2,000 births. With such a highly charged subject, it’s no surprise that the practice of surgery to remove the ambiguity is one of medicine’s most angrily debated medical questions. An article in the spring issue of Stanford Medicine magazine, a special report on bioethics, delves into the explosive topic.

The discipline of bioethics was spurred into being in the 1970s when several medical issues stirred up public controversy, and since then it has continued to expand. Today, several thousand people in the United States make bioethics the focus of their teaching, clinical practice or research.

“As medical treatments and delivery have become more complicated and society has become more diverse, ethical dilemmas have come center stage,” noted Dean Philip Pizzo, MD, in the magazine. “With these challenges emerging from every facet of medicine, more and more we rely on systematic analysis to guide our responses. That’s why today bioethics should be a part of medical school education for future physicians.”

Other articles in the bioethics package:

A look at bioethics at mid-life. Forty years after the field’s birth, what bioethicists do is changing.
A feature on the quandary of patients who seek treatment with stem cells, even if those treatments are unproven and might even harm them.
An article on expanding the supply of transplant organs by broadening the definition of death for donors.
A Q&A with the father of Jesse Gelsinger, who at 18 became the first person to die as a result of a gene therapy clinical trial.
This issue’s “Plus” section, featuring stories unrelated to the special report, includes:

The story of how a Stanford pediatrician inadvertently discovered that an ordinary antibiotic cures a deadly, rare liver disease known as primary sclerosing cholangitis.
An in-depth look at optogenetics — an experimental technique that allows researchers to control cell behavior with beams of light. In 2010, the journal Science named it one of 10 breakthroughs of the decade.
The magazine, including Web-only features, is available online at stanmed.stanford.edu. To request the print version, call (650) 736-0297 or e-mail medmag@stanford.edu.

Stanford Medicine is published three times a year by the Office of Communication & Public Affairs at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Provided by Stanford University Medical Center