By Rory Dulock | Staff Writer
A bioethics club at Baylor is in the process of being chartered while preparing for the National Bioethics Bowl — a nationwide competition that will be hosted on April 13 on Baylor’s campus.
“[The National Bioethics Bowl] is a national event that happens in the spring,” Winchester, Mass., junior Hannah Yi said. “Basically, universities from all around the [U.S.] come together and compete to talk about several different ethical topics or cases related to bioethics.”
Henderson, Nev., junior Zaahra Mehdi said the event allows students from all across the country to discuss important issues.
“It’s a discussion-based competition,” Mehdi said. “All these teams, about a month or two before the competition, get a case packet that has [about] eight different cases, and each of these cases has very different topics. Then, they each have three ethical questions that are posed, and you are meant to act as an ethics committee.”
Mehdi said it takes a lot of time and preparation to compete at the National Bioethics Bowl, and chartering the bioethics club would help with team prep.
“It’s up to you as a team to create a response to these dilemmas, and every team has to prepare for every single case,” Mehdi said. “When you get to the competition, you don’t know which case you’re going to get. It’s essentially like [debate and mock trial]. It’s similar to that in the sense that there’s two teams, and you’re across each other in a room, and there’s a judge panel.”
Mehdi said many of the situations are real problems in the world.
“It’s a great way to just throw around ideas, get insight from different places in the country and how their schools are teaching about bioethics,” Mehdi said. “These [ethical] questions and these cases are very real situations. Those are situations that have happened in the past. … It’s really, really interesting because you kind of develop your own understanding of ethics within the professional world.”
Yi said there has been a lot of interest among students to participate in the National Bioethics Bowl, which started the push for chartering the bioethics club.
“I think one reason for [the interest] is that it’s naturally very interdisciplinary,” Yi said. “The bio obviously attracts a lot of pre-med students, health science studies students and anyone interested in health and in science and medicine in general. But the ethics — … in order to really discuss these cases, you have to have a good grasp on the ethics behind that, so that attracts a lot of the philosophy students, especially medical humanities students.”
Yi said she thinks the competition would benefit any student, regardless of their major.
“Ethics in general, I think, can be applied to any field and should be applied to every discipline,” Yi said. “I think it’s really important for all students, no matter what background or discipline they come from, to understand the ethics that can be related to their field.”
