The Center for Ethics in Science and Technology

Join us tonight at 5:30pm (PST) for our Exploring Ethics event, Autonomous Bias Detection in a world of Sensational Headlines! Zoom link on the website! https://www.ethicscenter.net/nov2020/

In recent years, we have increasingly heard about the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to find areas of the brain that may be associated with our thoughts and actions, such as when we are being deceptive, if we trust someone or are in love, or our religiosity. While this research has been very exciting, concerns were raised that there may be a fundamental flaw in how at least some of these studies were analyzed. Lisa Eyler explains the implications and meaning of these new concerns, and addresses some of the ethical implications for scientists and the general public.

Come to our free event next month on Wednesday, October 7, 2020. It is about Protecting Privacy while sharing Biomedical Data for Machine Learning, truly relevant in this day and age as computer systems and technology grow more advanced. See you all there!

Dr. Charles Burton, President Elect of the Association for Medical Ethics, and Dr. Thomas Kipps of UC San Diego engage in a lively discussion on identifying best practices in medicine and developing strategies that reap the benefits of academic-industry collaborations without violating real or perceived conflicts of interest. Burton and Kipps are presented by the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology in San Diego.

Clinical trials are very important and will determine the safety of a medical product/device for patients like us. This is especially the case when COVID19 testing and vaccinations are being created. Georgia Sadler, a Professor of Surgery at UC San Diego, tackles the challenges that researchers face in recruiting diverse participants for clinical trials. The San Diego-based Center for Ethics in Science and Technology presents this program as part of a series addressing the ethical issues raised in the best-selling book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."

Medical research needs to incorporate a diverse population and otherwise, medicine and medical devices would be specifically created for those that are similar to research participants. Find out more on the issues and concerns surrounding this topic. Dr. Howard Taras, the director of Community Engagement for UC San Diego's Clinical and Translational Research Institute, describes the challenge of finding patients to participate in research studies and suggests involving community agencies to help potential subjects understand the benefits of their participation. Watch more videos here: https://www.uctv.tv/exploring-ethics/

Let's flashback to 2012, 8 years ago. The topic of ethnicity socioeconomic status and medical services are still relevant today as they were 8 years ago. Everyone is their own individual person coming form communities that are much different from yours, thus shouldn't medical care also be different? Too often, ethnicity and socioeconomic status affect access to medical services. A lack of scientific knowledge can impede a patient's ability to understand and influence their healthcare. Stanley Maloy, the dean of the College of Sciences at San Diego State University, offers a path to help diverse communities understand science well enough to make informed health care choices.

Plants have evolved the capability to convert atmospheric CO2 into biopolymers and therefore represent distributed systems for carbon removal that are highly scalable. Wolfgang Busch, Ph.D., Associate Professor Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, Salk Institute, explains the possibilities of efficient carbon storage in plants.

rtificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of engineering that has traditionally ignored brains, but recent advances in biologically-inspired deep learning have dramatically changed AI and made it possible to solve difficult problems in vision, planning and natural language. If you talk to Alexa or use Google Translate, you have experienced deep learning in action. This new technology opens a Pandora's box of problems that we must confront regarding privacy, bias and jobs. Terry Sejnowski, PhD, explains how his research strives to understand the computational resources of brains and to build linking principles from brain to behavior using computational models. Watch more videos here: https://www.uctv.tv/exploring-ethics/

Human behavior can be uncovered from social media based on the mass amount of data we all generate. There are increasing ethical concerns on how this data is analyzed and used. Tim K. Mackey, MAS, PhD highlights some of these challenges from the perspective of a researcher exploring the social media risk environment for prescription drug abuse.

Heart disease kills more people each year than any other disease. We are presented with an interesting problem for medicine: should we all look to see how our own heart is doing? Is it beneficial to us? Can we afford to do this? Elliot McVeigh, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering at UC San Diego, investigates these questions and more. #ethics #science #heartdisease #video