TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: Bio(un)ethical

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22 episodes
2023 to 2025
Median: 81 minutes
Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast examines contested norms and assumptions in medicine, science, and public health through conversations with philosophers, clinicians, legal scholars, and policy experts. Across episodes, it focuses on how ethical frameworks and empirical realities interact in real institutions—hospitals, research oversight systems, public health agencies, and policy processes—and how those interactions shape what care and research look like in practice.

A recurring theme is how to make decisions under uncertainty and constraint: how to weigh risks and benefits in human-subjects research, what justifies oversight and regulation, and how scarce medical resources should be allocated during emergencies. The show also spends significant time on the design and consequences of systems meant to protect patients and participants, including institutional review boards and federal research rules, and asks when protective approaches may inadvertently block valuable research or misalign with people’s interests.

The podcast frequently returns to questions of fairness, inclusion, and social power in health and science. It explores how social position can shape knowledge and credibility, what it means to treat some people as experts in moral or policy debates, and how democratic participation by laypeople might fit into health and science governance. Related discussions address race and medicine—what race is conceptually, and when (if ever) race should be used in clinical algorithms—highlighting tensions between accuracy, equity, and potential harm.

Several episodes take up ethically charged frontiers: end-of-life decision-making and whether care aligns with patient values; medical aid in dying in the context of mental illness; gene editing and reproductive choices; and the moral status of non-human animals and future AI systems. The show also addresses structural challenges in American healthcare and public health, such as access problems that persist even where clinicians are plentiful, workforce and data infrastructure limitations, and strategies to prevent or mitigate future pandemics, including debates over regulating high-risk pathogen research.