Program Overview

OFFICERS		ADVISORY BOARD
Steven E. Calvin MD Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Women's Health Co-Chairman of PHRH Bryan Dowd PhD Health Policy and Management Co-Chairman of PHRH Jasper Hopkins PhD RN Department of Philosophy Co-Chairman of PHRH Kirk C. Allison PhD MS Program Director		Daniel Berrigan SJ New York City Noam Chomsky PhD Linguistics & Philosophy MIT Richard Fenigsen MD PhD Cambridge, MA Robert George JD PhD Princeton University Carl M Kjellstrand MD PhD Aksys Ltd, Alberta Sandra Menssen PhD University of St. Thomas	Daniel Pilon PhD Solon Springs, WI Konald A Prem MD Obstetrics & Gynecology Philip J Regal PhD Ecology, Evolution & Behavior Alexander Schirger MD Mayo Clinic Hirofumi Uzawa PhD Doshisha University David Weissbrodt JD Law School Gregor Wolbring PhD University of Calgary

The Program in Human Rights and Health originated as the Program in Human Rights and Medicine founded in 1988 by Professors GEM Anscombe (Philosophy, Cambridge University), John M Dolan (Philosophy, University of Minnesota) and Hymie Gordon (Medical Genetics, Mayo Clinic). Joined by co-chair Steven E Calvin, MD (Perinatalogy) the Program affiliated in 1996 with the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women\'s Health in the University of Minnesota\'s Medical School. Kirk C Allison PhD joined as associate director in 2000. Professors Jasper Hopkins, Department of Philosophy, and Bryan Dowd, School of Public Health, joined as co-chairs in 2002. In 2006 the Program transferred to the School of Public Health adopting the broader name Program in Human Rights and Health, with Kirk Allison as director. "Health" reflects a broader view which comprehends not only medicine but the broader population perspective of public health.

The Program is devoted to scholarly investigation, practical projects and educational programs that bear on a wide range of moral, legal and public policy issues involving medicine and public health. Sources of problems addressed include first the astonishingly swift increase in technical knowledge (genetic diagnostics, stem cell biology, reproductive technologies, transplantation, therapeutics, and general biomedical science); second a widening gap in public health infrastructure and medical care available to the affluent and that of the poor (particularly in developing nations); third the explosive growth in medical costs; and, finally, shifts in demography and philosophy.

A Focus on the Vulnerable
In inquiries concerning fundamental questions about human rights in health contexts, the Program maintains a distinctive focus on various classes of vulnerable persons, for example, infants with handicaps, adults with disabilities, poor people, debilitated elderly patients and nursing home residents. The Program\'s work is informed by a powerful sense that certain technical, philosophical and economic transformations of medical practice and institutions, research and health policy, threaten important protections of human life once securely established. Others raise new risks (e.g. the impact of genetic knowledge on attitudes toward and therapy for disability, or the impact of corporate influence on scientific and academic priorities/integrity). Thus, one question the Program asks about actual and proposed technologies, procedures, and policies is: "What risks and burdens does this impose on the vulnerable?" A second is, "Whose interests are served?" And finally, "What can we learn from historical precedents?"

Disturbing Patterns
Scientific and technical advances in medicine do not dictate their own application. If a new discovery holds the promise of increasing our capacity to heal and protect, it can also prove the occasion for a thoughtless policy decision. Recent medical innovations pose questions to our moral intelligence to which some scholars and policy makers are giving highly debatable answers. Some of the debatable answers urge the institution of procedures under which benefits for some are secured by inflicting injuries on others.

Genuine Debate and Inquiry
A remarkable feature of current debates in biomedical ethics is the extent to which a number of contestable conclusions and doctrines have begun to assume the status of self-evident truths in the eyes of many participants. A principal goal of the Program is to correct this unhappy circumstance by encouraging and nourishing lively and wide ranging debates and inquiries given that much more is "up for grabs" than is usual. Hence, in the Program\'s seminar series and conferences the speakers represent an uncommonly wide range of opinion.

Questioning preconceptions is an important source of the strength and health of a university. The Program is firmly committed to nourishing that source of strength and giving real service to the ideal of encouraging many voices to be heard in the on-going urgent conversations about matters of access, life and death. This goal is not simply a moral ideal; it is a requirement of intellectual advancement, particularly in the fields of ethics and policy. Each of us has only partial understanding and only part of the competencies required to find our way through the difficulties. To restrict discourse to a single moral perspective (be it secular or religious), a single discipline or narrow range of disciplines would be to undercut investigations from the outset. As technical advances do not dictate their application or ethics, nor policy processes automatically ensure equity or efficiency, the Program in Human Rights and Medicine casts its net wide to develop a deepened understanding in questions of law, science, morality and public policy that affect the vulnerable and larger community, inviting to the table persons and perspectives from the academy and community.

Central Goals
The Program is also firmly committed to a task of recovery. Contemporary understanding of our moral heritage in medicine is starving for want of proper nourishment. And that intellectual starvation can be counted on to result in debatable policy decisions and in as yet unimagined threats to innocent human life. What is needed is a program that nourishes and strengthens understanding of medicine\'s rich moral heritage, that subjects attacks on traditional protections of human life to critical scrutiny, and that draws on the deep resources of philosophy, law, and science to nourish the necessary critical skills and analytical apparatus and to uncover the facts required for intelligent investigation of problems in biomedical ethics. The Program in Human Rights and Medicine is dedicated to these goals and seeks to accomplish them both through debate, research and publication and through educational efforts in academic institutions, hospitals, nursing homes, and the community at large.

Recent Program lectures, seminars and series:
 

• Is the Economy the Patient? -  Prenatal Diagnosis under Cost/Benefit Analysis
• Genetic Engineering: Revising the Foundations of Ethics?
• AIDS, Drugs, and Africa: Patent Rights or Patients\' Rights?
• Refugees /  Immigrants: Unrecognized Torture Sequelae Affect the Health of Many
• Mental Health Issues of Aging Holocaust Survivors and the 2nd Generation
• A Patient Not \'Seen\': Coercion, Prostitution and Medical Awareness
• Cloning and the Challenge to Human Dignity
• Health Insurance, Demand, and \'The Case of the Vanishing Welfare Gain\'
• Human Rights and Public Health Series
• The (Moral) Trouble with Embryo Research
• Is Medicine Still a Profession?

Audio recordings of many programs are available. For a more comprehensive list of programs, resources and related information, please visit our website at www.umn.edu/phrm. Should you have a specific interest in human rights and health or wish to be notified of upcoming events via email or post, please contact us. We invite you to support the Program through the Minnesota Medical Foundation, www.mmf.umn.edu. Donations by check or online are tax-deductible.