For this meeting, I wanted to give everyone a break from all the data and analysis we’ve been doing lately and dive into something way more philosophical: biomedical ethics. We talked about how medicine isn’t just about science and how it’s about people, values, and decisions that sometimes don’t have a perfect answer.
I started it off by asking, “Is one human life more valuable than another?” It was a question I recently had to debate on in English class and I thought it’d be perfect for this meeting. Some people immediately said no, all life is equal. Others hesitated. That led us into one of the most famous ethical thought experiments: the trolley problem (or train scenario). I explained it like this: you’re standing at a switch, and a train is about to hit five people. But if you pull the lever, it’ll switch tracks and only hit one person. What do you do?
Some students said they’d pull the lever to save more lives. Others said they couldn’t live with the guilt of being the one who chose to kill someone, even if it saved more people. I tied it back to real-world medicine, how do doctors decide who gets an organ transplant when there aren’t enough to go around? What if one patient is older and one is younger? What if one has a better chance of surviving, but the other has a family depending on them? We discussed about how policies like The United Network for Organ Sharing prioritize transplants based on survival chance and recovery, or The CDC’s START triage system prioritizes first responders because saving them means saving more lives.
We talked about the four pillars of medical ethics: autonomy (respecting patients’ choices), beneficence (doing good), non-maleficence (doing no harm), and justice (fairness in treatment). I showed how every real-life ethical problem touches on these in different ways. For example, does helping one person sometimes mean harming another? Is it okay to risk one life to save many?
We also looked at a few real case studies—like doctors using untested drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic, or whether kids should be allowed to refuse treatment. Each situation led to more discussion, and I could tell people were really thinking. Some students even changed their minds halfway through a debate.
At the end, I told everyone that being in medicine means facing tough calls where there may not be a clear answer on whats right or wrong.
