Recently there has been a lot of attention brought to the concept of collaboration in academia, specifically in the sciences. Gone are the days (at least in our niche) where disciplines drew a dividing line in the sand – scientists keep to one side of the room, humanities, you go play in the other corner, etc… We understand that there cannot be one without the other and the more we can begin to build a “common language,” the better off we will be as researchers, academics, students and all around everyday people.
One of the many areas that the Oncofertility Consortium has implemented a collaborative paradigm is in the Oncofertility Saturday Academies (OSA) held throughout the country. Young women in high school from diverse backgrounds are engaged in the basic sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. We open up our lab and say, “please come in, we’d like to show you what we’re doing and teach you how to be a better scientist too.”
Some areas we focus on in our Saturday Academy along with lab work are the ethical, social, legal and religious implications of oncofertility research. Dr. Laurie Zoloth, Oncofertility Consortium member and Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University, has been a key component of the Ethics curriculum in OSA over the last 5 years. According to Dr. Zoloth, “one of the most important things about doing research in reproductive health is thinking about the implications for human societies, human communities and the ethical implications that each individual faces.”
Dr. Zoloth and her students put together a 2-hour course for the young women, introducing them to basic definitions, theory and a case-based method of ethical decision-making in order to demonstrate the complicated and important questions that oncofertility raises. Dr. Zoloth says, “the attempt of our section is to broaden their understanding of the competing and sharply different moral arguments that attend to this research so that they know what the basic definitions, initial conversations, and arguments that have been made to objections raised from religion and moral philosophy are to this kind of research.”
At the Oncofertility Consortium, we believe that it is imperative that the future of science be a collaborative initiative and this is the basis through which we developed our national OSA program 5 years ago. According to Dr. Zoloth, “the complex decisions that are invoked by their [research] have to be apart of their science as well. So we teach [the girls] right along with the science, so they’ll understand how intertwined the work of a scientist is with the concerns of their society.”
Stay tuned for Part 2…
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