ASBH Day 1

October 26, 2006

Long day today as I opted for a pre-conference workshop. “Morals and Media: Using Film and Television to teach Bioethics and Humanities” was well worth getting up early for. One of the speakers has the title “Filmmaker in Residence and Director of the Program in Bioethics and Film at a University Center for Biomedical Ethics.” Sounds like a good gig to me. I got several good handouts and ideas, including an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer creates a living will.

The Welcoming Plenary was by former Colorado governor Richard D. Lamm. He set out to call attention to problems in the current system of healthcare delivery/finance, and to highlight strategies for re-thinking the entire healthcare system. He didn’t offer any “how do we get there,” rather he highlighted various models for consideration, and maintained that once we know the model we want to move to, we can figure out how to get there. The Q&A was—as one might imagine given the topic—lively.

One of the things that Lamm said as the Q&A wrapped up is that if he was 30 years old again, bioethics is the field he would be in. The issues of bioethics raise the most pressing questions of the coming years.