14 | Alta Charo on Bioethics and the Law

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2018

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, scientists tend to focus on whether they can do something, not whether they should. Questions of what we should do tend to wander away from the pristine beauty of science into the messy worlds of ethics and the law. But with the ongoing revolutions in biology, we can't avoid facing up to some difficult should-questions. Alta Charo is a world expert in a gamut of these issues, working as a law professor and government official specializing in bioethics. We hit all the big questions: designer babies, birth control, abortion, religious exemptions, stem cells, end of life care, and more. This episode will give you the context necessary to think about a host of looming questions from a legal as well as a moral perspective. Alta Charo is currently the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She earned a B.A. in Biology from Harvard, and went on to receive her J.D. from Columbia University. Charo served as a bioethics advisor on the Obama Administration transition team, as well as working as a senior policy advisor at the Food and Drug Administration. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and was awarded the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award at UW-Madison.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody and welcome to the Minescape Podcast.
0:03.1	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.9	And on this podcast we'll often talk about scientific advances, what we learn about the
0:09.8	universe, but sometimes we also talk about philosophical questions of right and wrong,
0:14.9	the morality and the ethics of how we should lead our lives.
0:19.1	And these domains of science and ethics bump into each other.
0:23.5	They're not separate.
0:25.1	Things we're forced or nudged toward asking ethical questions about scientific and technological
0:30.5	advances.
0:31.5	We've learned something about the universe.
0:34.1	We've developed the ability to do something with our scientific knowledge, but should we
0:39.5	do that thing?
0:40.5	Should it be legal to do that thing?
0:42.8	And these are not just dorm room philosophy questions either.
0:45.6	The government often has to make decisions about what should and should not be legal when
0:49.9	science introduces new possibilities into our lives.
0:53.9	So today we welcome an honest to goodness law professor onto the podcast for the first
0:58.0	time, and we'll be talking about a wide range of questions dealing with these bioethical
1:02.3	and legal issues.
1:04.2	Alta Sharo is a professor of law and bioethics at the university of Wisconsin and Madison,
1:09.4	and she's been active on both the scholarship and policy sides of the equation.
1:13.9	She served as a bioethics advisor on the Obama administration transition team when Obama
	...

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