BTHX Courses, Bioethics Center at the University of Minnesota

This course offers an opportunity for study of bioethics topics of contemporary interest.

The Proseminar will familiarize graduate students with a wide range of topics in bioethics and the work of a number of faculty affiliated with the program, to help students select mentors and research programs.

This course uses real cases to examine the most frequent ethical problems faced by clinicians, patients and families, and ethics consultants. Topics include forgoing life sustaining treatment, decisional capacity, informed consent, treatment refusals, death and dying, pediatric ethics, reproductive issues, research ethics, psychiatric illness and more. This course is intended for students in all fields, practicing clinicians, and members of ethics committees and consulting services.

This course addresses the fundamental issues in the ethics and oversight of human subjects research, and places these issues into the broader context of the responsible conduct of research.

This course provides an overview of major theoretical frameworks and foundational issues in bioethics.

This course surveys major topics and issues in biomedical ethics including patients' rights and duties, informed consent, confidentiality, ethical issues in medical research, the initiation and termination of medical treatment, euthanasia, abortion, and the allocation of medical resources.

This course provides an introduction to ethical issues in health policy. Topics will vary to reflect issues of current significance. Discussion will relate to law and politics as appropriate, but will focus on moral analyses of policy issues.

This seminar examines law and bioethics as means of controlling important biomedical developments, and discusses the relationship of law and bioethics and their role in governing biomedical research, reproductive decision-making, assisted reproduction, genetic testing/screening, genetic manipulation, cloning, the definition of death, use of life-sustaining treatment, and organ transplantation.

This seminar is tailored to students wishing to incorporate work in bioethics into their career plans. It provides an overview of research methods, and discusses career publication strategies, authorship issues, ethics in publication, and peer review.

This course examines the social context in which contemporary meanings of health and illness are understood by providers and patients, and discusses their ethical implications. Course readings will be drawn from history, social science, literature, and first person accounts.

Students propose an area for study with faculty guidance, expressed in a written proposal which includes outcome objectives and work plan. A faculty member directs the student's work and evaluates their project.

This course offers an opportunity for advanced study of a variety of bioethics topics of contemporary interest.

This multidisciplinary course is available to graduate students in genetic counseling and others interested in ethical and legal issues that are faced by health care practitioners who see clients with genetic concerns. Students learn how to review and assess relevant scientific and bioethics literature and engage in the process of individual and group decision-making about current ethical and legal challenges in human genetics.

This course explores the moral and political importance of gender in topics related to health. These issues are situated within their institutional and broader social contexts. This course is appropriate for a wide audience including students from the health professions, philosophy, social science, and law.

The purpose of this course to explore the roots and implications of what we will call "medical consumerism." How is the consumerist model of medicine shaping our concepts of disease and disability? What larger historical developments have led to our current situation? How is the movement towards medical consumerism changing the profession of medicine itself? And how are the tools of medical enhancement shaping the way we think about our identities and the way we live our lives? This seminar will draw on an interdisciplinary set of texts from philosophy, history, literature, law, film and the social sciences as a way of exploring these larger questions.

Students propose an area for advanced study with faculty guidance, expressed in a written proposal which includes outcome objectives and work plan. A faculty member directs the student's work and evaluates their project.