Dear faculty, students, and associates of the Center for Bioethics,

A year ago, the murder of George Floyd, along with the disproportionate number of COVID infections and deaths in communities of color forced the field of Bioethics in general, and us at the HMS Center for Bioethics, to reflect upon the complicity that our field has had in not doing more to address these issues and to recognize that we must do better. Your commitment to work with us over this year, as well as the contributions of your time and expertise, have been instrumental to these efforts and have been deeply appreciated.  

As we approach the Juneteenth holiday, we at the HMS Center for Bioethics would like to reflect upon and share with you some of the results and goals of our diversity, inclusion, belonging and anti-racism work over the last year and into the future. We have worked hard to build new collaborations, elevate and amplify voices of people of color doing work in this space, and interrogate our teaching and curriculum for the ways in which racism is embedded in our culture and we are working to redress these issues. 

The shift to virtual communication during the pandemic created a unique opportunity for the Center to elevate and amplify voices and issues to a national stage. To this end, we worked to ensure that the voices we chose were bringing diverse perspectives and issues to the forefront.

Among our most important initiatives has been the collaboration that our Center has been developing with the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University. Together, we are working to advance research and education focused on the sources of structural racism in our society and the development of anti-racist initiatives to address them. Our work together has included:

We celebrated Black History Month in February with a series of weekly seminars. Harriet Washington focused on medical apartheid and the historical roots of racial mistreatment in medical research. Lillie Head and Riggins Earl examined the enduring ethical lessons of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. Daniel Dawes addressed the political determinants of health and how to integrate racial justice into healthcare and clinical research. Finally, Dana Bowen Matthew discussed the health impact of legally-enforced segregation through the history of structural racism in Charlottesville. Each of these programs were co-hosted by students and faculty from Harvard and Tuskegee, and included a private session following each seminar for the students to interact together and with each of the speakers.

As a result of weekly meetings between the leadership of the bioethics programs at Tuskegee and Harvard, our Center’s faculty also offered guest lectures to students in the Tuskegee Bioethics Honors Program. Faculty at both Centers have also engaged in collaborative research and publications regarding ways to increase trust and vaccination rates among minority communities.

The Center’s seminar series on Contemporary Books in Bioethics provided another opportunity to address racism and social injustice. Alondra Nelson presented a public forum on her recent book about “The Social Life of DNA,” exploring the impact of DNA analysis on our understanding of slavery and the ties of Black people to their ancestral homelands. And Ruha Benjamin presented a public forum on her recent book, Race After Technology,  examining how the increasingly ubiquitous use of artificial intelligence creates and reinforces structural inequalities. 

The Center also addressed the troubling increase in racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders with a student initiated and faculty moderated panel discussion.

Within the Masters Program, we have supported these efforts by bringing diverse faculty from across the country to teach in our courses and by expanding our curricular offerings. New additions included Riley Taitingfong joining Natalie Kofler for Environmental Ethics, Ruqaiijah Yearby joining Charlene Galarneau to teach Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Bioethics, and Frances Shen introducing a new course on Bioethics, Bias and Justice. In addition, we began an audit of our curriculum and readings, leading to the addition of African and African-American perspectives in our Foundations I Course. As we continue our curricular work, we will be guided by a full audit conducted by students in Professor Shen’s course, which also contextualizes our program with Masters programs at peer institutions. Finally, we are delighted to announce the appointment of MBE alum and capstone seminar leader Matthew Riley as a Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine in recognition of his important contributions in advancing curricular components in Capstone and his work in surgical ethics and global health ethics.

Additionally, as we work toward hiring both full-time research faculty in the Center and additional staff to help support the growing MBE program and to fill vacant positions, we have looked carefully at our recruitment processes to increase the diversity of candidates and the objectivity of the process. We look forward to telling you more about these hires in the fall.

These examples are only a partial list of the work we have done and continue to do to support health equity and end racism. We are deeply grateful to those of you who have stepped forward to help us do more and be better. Our commitment to this work is unwavering. It continues to be our goal to ensure that the field of bioethics becomes more inclusive and diverse, and to make a positive contribution towards creating a world where no one need fear receiving inequitable health care because of their race, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, or national origin.

Sincerely,
Bob, Christine, Becca, Ed, and Millie