What are the important issues in bioethics today?
Ezekiel Emanuel: Bioethics, I would say, there are problems which need to be addressed, but I also think there’s a sort of manpower problem. We do not have a very good training program in this country [USA] for bioethics. We don’t support it actually, despite the fact that it occupies a lot of media attention. Despite the fact that everyone says how important it is. You always hear this phrase: “Our technology is outrunning our values and our bioethical understanding.” And yet we have a very poor way of actually supporting it over the long run so people can take time and address big problems, and think for a while on some of these problems. As I mentioned, some of the issues that we address, we can be sure that it’s going to take us two years to think through some of this stuff. And we don’t have a mechanism to really support that. And one of the consequences of that is we have not been good at training young people to come through, and to attract some of the smartest young people into
