“It is unwise to have bioethicists, involved in decision making, report directly to one of the investigators or the Director of IHGT.” So read the report of a scientific panel appointed to review clinical-trial procedures at Penn’s Institute for Human Gene Therapy (IHGT).
But in truth, that did not happen at Penn, says Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics and the Trustee Professor of Bioethics in Molecular and Cellular Engineering.
When the University announced in May that, among other changes planned, the center would become a free-standing department in the School of Medicine, many of the resulting media reports
presented a picture of the University’s widely-quoted ethicists under the control of the much-scrutinized gene-therapy lab.
It is true, a clearly irritated Caplan said, that the center will become a department, chaired by him. Committees assigned to conduct its (routine) six-year review recommended well before the Danforth committee report’s release that, in addition to the Center, there should also be a department of bioethics to better support the bioethics-degree programs that have formed in recent years. (The Center’s faculty currently make their “tenure homes” in various departments across the University.)
But, he explains, “The creation of a department has nothing—repeat nothing—to do with any statement of the Danforth committee, despite press reports to the contrary.”
A few members of the bioethics staff, including Caplan, have had their “tenure home” in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Engineering, which is chaired by Dr. James M. Wilson, the IHGT’s director. But the Center for Bioethics reports only to the dean of the medical school. Caplan reports only to the dean and the University president, and he is paid not through the department but the medical school. “Most of [the center’s] 15 faculty have nothing to do with anything related to genetics,” he says.
Contrary to the suggestion of press reports, Caplan added, gene-therapy research proposals went to Institutional Review Boards, not the bioethics center, for formal review. “There is a suggestion, in some press accounts, that informal talk between bioethicists and gene therapy types … is a bad thing. This is completely stupid. Of course we talk to our colleagues. We do, can, should, will and must.”