One university is putting diversity front and center and helping to ensure that the next generation of bioethicists is more culturally and ethnically diverse than ones gone by. UMBC students have recently started a Bioethics Student Association.
This year, the UMBC Bioethics Student Association (BSA) will be sending seven students to the 12th Annual National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference at Harvard University. BSA now boasts 70+ members and had only 2 members attend attended NUBC last year, but this year has a proud troop of 7 marching their way to Boston.
Why is THIS undergraduate bioethics group, in particular, an important harbinger for the future of diversity of bioethics writ large?
The Princeton Review ranked UMBC one of the 20 most diverse universities in the nation, and the membership of the BSA reflects this diversity.
BSA Vice President Batsheva Melissa Chapman comments, "Although we all come from different races and religions, we have one goal in mind: to bring about the awareness of the different ethical issues that society faces in the world of science."
Students with majors as diverse as philosophy, bioinformatics and computational biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, public health, and statistics will attend NUBC from UMBC this year. One student, Richard Blissett said, "Once I got to college, I suddenly started wondering about many of the ethical issues in my field." He will present on the ethics of marketing preimplantion genetic screening to infertile couples.