Jan Coe e-Portfolio

 

 

CCT Courses > Independent Study: History and Ethics of Biotechnology >

I enrolled in a Harvard Extension School course called HSCI-E137, History and Ethics of Biotechnology in the Spring of 2005. The two hour class met every Wednesday night with an optional one hour discussion group (which I joined) before class. Although I took the class non-credit from Harvard's point-of-view, I did receive one credit for it as an independent study from the CCT Program at UMass Boston.

The reading for the course was demanding - sometimes whole books every week! Nevertheless, it was a great class in which all 70 students participated during the class discussions. I wrote three essays during the course of the semester and have selected one of them for this e-Portfolio as well as my final Reflection paper.

The ELSI paper gave me the chance to delve deeply into an issue or problem surrounding biotechnology. I credit some of its success to the way in which Dr. Nadine Weidman provided a framework for the essay, most of which I reproduce below:

"The second essay assignment asks you to identify an issue, problem, theme, concern, claim or prediction about biotechnology in Krimsky's Biotechnics and Society, and follow it up, to determine where that issue stands at the present day. What was the status of the issue when Krimsky was writing in 1991 about the period 1970-1988? And what has become of it since then? Construct an historical argument about change over time: how has the issue changed in the past 15-20 years? Has it changed? In what ways? To what extent?... You may focus your topic relatively narrowly by asking, for example, what has become of a particular policy or regulatory body, or even a particular individual, since the late 1980s. Or you could investigate one of Krimsky's broader themes, about the mechanization of biology, or the growth of "trade secrets" in science, or the developing industry-university nexus, or the role of the media. Do you see any of these problems getting played out in the present day? Krimsky makes a number of predictions about where biotech might be headed...Have any of these predictions come true?"

I was interested quite early on in the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project and this assignment was a chance to look at the development over time of a concept that seems a good idea on the surface, but taking the long view reveals that the fears and misgivings attached to a new technology, especially a biotechnology, seem to subside in only a few years - barring catastrophes...I still hope to revisit this paper and possibly submit it for publication at a future date.

 
My Reflection paper for CCT 696 tried to tie together all the themes in the biotechnology and ethics course in such a way as to not only report on what I learned, but how I assimilated it as well; how I changed during the course of the semester from being fairly pro-development to much more cautious and, actually, a bit letdown about the promise of these technologies. In the process of revisiting my work for this course, I discovered that Dr. Weidman's video lectures (a new phenomenon since I took the course) are now online through Distance Education - what a great idea! Click here for the lectures.

 

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Last modified: 10/31/07
© Jan Coe