During its first meeting, a new student club debated whether doctors have the right to conduct clinical trials on cancer patients, giving some patients a new drug and denying it to others.
“It’s difficult because … (sometimes) you feel like clinical trials are wrong, but at the same time, they can potentially save millions of lives,” said Becky Barber, a fourth-year neuroscience student and co-founder of the club.
Bioethics Brigades launched earlier this month and meets every other week to discuss biomedical ethical dilemmas such as these. Barber and Jessica Kriksciun, a fourth-year psychobiology student, formed the club after taking a biomedical ethics course last spring taught by Tiffany Cvrkel, a molecular, cell and developmental biology lecturer.
The students created the group to garner support for a biomedical ethics minor that the two want to see established at UCLA.
Currently 10 members are in the club. Kriksciun and Barber said they hope a strong turnout at future club meetings will show the molecular, cell and developmental biology faculty that there is enough student interest for a minor to be viable.
“Doctors might come across something ethically provoking during their jobs, such as abortion, and it’s important that they know how to handle those scenarios,” Barber said.
To create a minor at UCLA, faculty members need to draft a proposal with a list of criteria of the minor’s possible requirements and the justifications for each part of the proposed curriculum, according to the guide to undergraduate course and program approval.
Once the faculty develops the proposal, the Faculty Executive Committee and then the Undergraduate Council vote on whether to officially establish the minor, said Kyle McJunkin, director of curriculum coordination and operations.
Right now, Kriksciun and Barber are focusing on promoting the club to other students to gain support for the minor, Kriksciun said.
Both aspiring doctors, Kriksciun and Barber said taking Cvrkel’s class changed some of the ways they plan to deal with future patients.
Kriksciun said most of the class disagreed with performing voluntary amputation until Cvrkel argued it could help patients become more psychologically sound.
Currently, Kriksciun and Barber are conducting research about biomedical ethics with Cvrkel that they hope will be used as the framework for future biomedical ethics courses, Barber said.
Kriksciun said she is trying to come up with a list of criteria doctors could use to define patient competence – the capacity for patients to consent to or refuse medical care. Barber said her research involves trying to come up with a better set of criteria to define diseases.
Barber and Kriksciun said that they are unsure when the minor will be established at UCLA, but are hoping that it will be available next year.