The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology’s overarching mission is to understand, evaluate, and improve the ethical understanding and cultural influences on and implications of science and technology.
We realize out mission through:
• Fostering recognition of the many, complex ways that ethics, values, and culture interact with science, technology, and medicine.
• Promoting a better understanding of the relationship between science and values by supporting and pursuing multidisciplinary research on the nature of science and the role of values within it, and on the ethics and politics of science.
• Seeking to improve the relationship between science and values by connecting with the public, professionals, scientists and policymakers over a variety of issues. We want to help the public know how to balance their cultural and moral commitments relative to the improvements in their lives offered by science, technology, and medicine. We want to help medical professionals balance compassionate care with safe and efficacious treatment. We want to help scientists balance evidence with imagination, rigor with moral responsibility. We want to help policymakers learn how to integrate good science and democratic participation to promote the public good.
Why Give
The cornerstone of the Center for Values’ outreach is a free public lecture series that brings in leading scholars to investigate topics at the intersection of technology and the humanities. In a cross-disciplinary approach to fostering public intellectualism, an international group of authors, artists, scientists, philosophers, theorists and engineers engage a diverse audience in thinking about issues ranging from issues on Creativity, Human Enhancement, Medicine & Science, Food & Diet, Gender & Science, and Viruses, with this year’s focus The Power of Science Fiction. The speakers further play a role in our academic community by meeting with interested undergraduate and graduate students, and with members of courses that are designed in conjunction with the series. A contribution to the Center displays a commitment to ethical reflection and social responsibility.
