Applications Being Accepted for Young Scholar Award in Perinatal Bioethics

The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) and the March of Dimes are pleased to announce the annual Young Scholar Award in Perinatal Bioethics.

Who is eligible? To be eligible for this award, applicants must be early in their career development, including those who are actively enrolled in graduate school, post-doctoral programs or no higher in their career achievement than the assistant professorship level.

Applicants should submit proposals in the 'Perinatal Ethics' topic category in the ASBH Call for Proposals. Proposals that would fall into the perinatal ethics topic category include but are not limited to topics such as pre-conception health, reproductive decision making, pregnancy, pre-natal genetic testing, labor and delivery, newborn screening, neonatal decision making and other topics related to the perinatal time frame. Proposals may address clinical decision making, research or other bioethical or humanities-related topics.

Deadline. Submit an abstract to the ASBH Call for Proposals on the ASBH Web site no later than March 3, 2010 at /meetings/annual/callguidelines.html. To be considered for this award, submit your proposal under the 'Perinatal Ethics' topic category where indicated.

From those submitted abstracts, a select group of applicants will then be asked to submit a full paper for review by the March of Dimes/ASBH review committee.

The Award. The award will be presented at the ASBH Annual Meeting in October to the applicant whose paper is selected to be of the highest quality and intellectual rigor among the submitted papers. The award winner will receive an honorarium of $1,000 and will present the paper at a plenary session at the ASBH Annual Meeting, which will feature an invited lecture by a distinguished scholar from the field of perinatal ethics.

For more information, please contact Alison Saylor at asaylor@Connect2amc.com or Ann Umemoto at aumemoto@marchofdimes.com

NARRATIVE GENETICS SEMINAR: Thursday, February 25

The Social Life of DNA

6-8pm, Room 801, International Affairs Building
www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/international_affairs.html

The Social Life of DNA: Traditional and genetic 'root-seeking' and the implications of these practices for contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, diaspora, ancestry, and memory. Alondra Nelson, Ph.D., Columbia University, Sociology. http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/fac-bios/nelson/faculty.html

Professor Nelson joined the Columbia faculty in July 2009 after teaching sociology and African American studies at Yale. She will talk about aspects of her current project, “Reconciliation Projects: Slavery, Memory and the Social Life of DNA,” which traces how claims about race and ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures, including family genealogy and ancestry, reparations politics and the formation of public and collective memory. “Bio Science: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry” (2008) is a recent publication of Nelson’s addressing the effects and implications of direct-to-consumer genetic testing. It is available on the Narrative Genetics Google site http://sites.google.com/site/narrativegenetics/ . Watch the site for other readings.

The Narrative Genetics seminar at Columbia is sponsored by ISERP http://iserp.columbia.edu/workshops/genetics. The seminar is open to faculty, students, and others in the Columbia University community and in the New York metropolitan area. Presenters discuss work in progress and welcome participation in the discussion.

SEMINAR ON GENETIC DISCRIMINATION 2/9/2010

Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry
Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University Medical Center
Seminar series on Legal and Ethical Issues in Psychiatry and General
Medicine

Jessica L. Roberts, JD
Associate-in-Law, Columbia Law School
Assistant Professor of Law (Fall 2010), University of Houston Law Center

Bahrad Sokhansanj, PhD
2nd year student, Columbia Law School

Introducing the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act: Civil Rights in the Post-Genome Era

Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010
4:00 - 5:15 p.m.
Room 3002
New York State Psychiatric Institute

Sequencing the human genome provides a powerful tool for advancing personalized medicine but, at the same time, brings with it the potential for discrimination. Despite few reports of genetic discrimination, the public remains wary of genetic tests, fearful that a result showing the risk for disease and disability would lead to being denied health insurance and losing their job. To address these fears, scientists and biotechnology industry lobbyists advocated federal legislation to prevent genetic discrimination. After almost thirteen years of legislative debate, Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) in May 2008.
GINA prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating on the basis of genetic information. We will describe the role of scientists in shaping GINA, its current protections, and the implications of enacting fear-based antidiscrimination legislation.

Upcoming Speakers

March 16: Judge Donald Volkert, Superior Court of NJ, Passaic Vicinage

April 20: Nancy Dubler, LLB, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva Univ.

May 11: Lynn Jansen, PhD, Bioethics Institute, NY Medical College

June 15: Forensic Psychiatry Fellows, Dept. of Psychiatry, Columbia University

For further information or to convey suggestions about future speakers, contact Paul S. Appelbaum, MD, Director, Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, at 212-543-4184 or psa21@columbia.edu.

MARCH OF DIMES' Archives Grand Rounds

Date: Thursday, February 4, 2010

Time: 12:30 to 1:30 pm

Location: West Conference Room

March of Dimes

1275 Mamaroneck Avenue

White Plains, NY 10605

Speaker: Rebecca Skloot

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: The Story of HeLa Cells

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer in the subjects of science and medicine. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of Memphis. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, NY Times Magazine, Discover Magazine, and other magazines and journals. Her new book to be released in February, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, tells the story of the African-American woman Henrietta Lacks and her cell line – known as HeLa cells – that have been used in biomedical research since the 1950s. HeLa cells were instrumental in the development of the Salk polio vaccine and have been used to advance research in in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping. The bioethical implications of the use of HeLa cells in scientific research have paramount significance today as we grapple with a host of complex issues in medicine, genetics, and reproduction. Ms. Skloot used the resources of the March of Dimes Archives for a portion of her research, and an article accompanying the release of her book appears in the February 2010 issue of Oprah Magazine. For more information, see http://rebeccaskloot.com/.

POSTPONED! January 21 Narrative Genetics seminar. POSTPONED!

The Narrative Genetics Seminar, “Genes and Plays,” scheduled for Thursday, January 21, 2010, has been postponed due to a family emergency. This compelling program of dramatic reading and discussion of the play “Distracted,” led by Karen Rothenberg and Jeff Seltzer, will be rescheduled for later in the spring semester. We will let you know day/date/time ASAP.

For those interested, Karen Rothenberg be giving the Levine Lecture at Fordham Law School on “From Eugenics to the ‘New’ Genetics: The Play’s the Thing.” Narrative Genetics seminar participants are welcome to attend. The lecture will be on March 10 in the early evening and we will keep you posted on details.

POSTPONED! Narrative Genetics Seminar: Thursday, January 21. POSTPONED!

GENES AND PLAYS

6-8pm, Room 801, International Affairs Building
www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/international_affairs.html

Genes and Plays: Using theatre to enhance understanding of the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics.

Scenes from the recent play "Distracted" will be used to enhance discussion on the implications of ADHD on the child, parents and society.

KAREN H. ROTHENBERG

Karen H. Rothenberg, J.D., M.P.A., is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law, founding Director of the Law & Health Care Program, and she served as Dean of the University of Maryland School of Law from 1999-2009. Professor Rothenberg is a leading national expert on legal issues in health care. She is spending her current sabbatical doing research as a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School and at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture, as well as at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. www.law.umaryland.edu/faculty/profiles/faculty.html?facultynum=103

JEFF SELTZER
Jeff Seltzer, Ph.D., J.D., is a child psychologist and mental health coordinator for the Head Start and Pre-Kindergarten programs of the Montgomery County, Maryland public schools. He received his J.D. from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He lectures widely on the delivery of mental health services and the legal rights of children with disabilities and he served as the Expert Mental Health Consultant at the University of Maryland, providing region-wide training and technical assistance to Head Start programs.

(Optional) readings for the seminar are available on the public Narrative Genetics Google Site,http://sites.google.com/site/narrativegenetics/Home

The Narrative Genetics seminar at Columbia is sponsored by ISERP http://iserp.columbia.edu/workshops/genetics. The seminar is open to faculty, students, and others in the Columbia University community and in the New York metropolitan area. Presenters discuss work in progress and welcome participation in the discussion.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Modern Language Association annual meeting Los Angeles, 6-9 January 2011 Literature and Science Division

REPRODUCTIONS: EUGENICS AND GENETICS

Literary engagements with eugenic and genetic theories and practices. How do literary texts reproduce or rewrite scientific discourses of disability, deafness, immigration and ethnicity, disease, breeding? 250-word abstracts to gardenr@upstate.edu by 5 Mar. 2010.