Authors

Trials of HIV Treatment-as-Prevention: Ethics and Science. Friday, March 7

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High hopes for overcoming the HIV epidemic rest to a large extent on HIV Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP). Large cluster-randomized controlled trials are currently under way to test the effectiveness of different TasP strategies in general populations in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, however, international antiretroviral treatment (ART) guidelines have already moved to definitions of ART eligibility including all – in the US guidelines – or nearly all – in the WHO guidelines – HIV-infected people. In this panel, we are bringing together the leaders of three TasP trials in sub-Saharan Africa, bioethicists, and public health researchers to debate the tension between the policy intentions expressed in these guidelines and the historic opportunity to learn whether TasP works or not. Please join us in considering different options to resolving this tension.

  • Till Bärnighausen, Harvard School of Public Health, and Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Science
  • Max Essex, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Deenan Pillay, Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Science, and University College London
  • Velephi Okello, Swaziland National AIDS Programme, Ministry of Health
  • Dan Wikler, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Nir Eyal, Harvard Medical School

 

Moderator: Megan Murray, Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School

 

Friday, March 7th, 10am-12pm

Kresge G3, Harvard School of Public Health

Harvard Effective Altruism (HEA): Tuesday, 7pm–Professor “Mad Max” Tegmark on the Future of Life

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HEA’s first talk of the semester promises to be a good one, in an area we haven’t covered much before: shaping the far future. In the footsteps of the Future of Humanity Institute, and Nick Beckstead‘s research on the altruistic importance of the far future, we present:

 

The Future of Life: a Cosmic Perspective

 

a talk by Professor Max Tegmark

 

Tuesday, March 4, 7 p.m.

Sever 202

 

Exploring how we humans have repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos (and hence our future opportunities), but also the power of our humans minds to understand it and develop technologies with the power to enrich or extinguish humanity.

 

Known as “Mad Max” for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, his scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his new popular book “Our Mathematical Universe”. He is an MIT physics professor with more than two hundred technical papers and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.”

 

HHIP: Evaluating Effective Charities – GiveWell cofounder Elie Hassenfeld: Tuesday, 8 PM

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Harvard High Impact Philanthropy presents:

Evaluating Effective Charities with Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell

How can you maximize the impact of your charitable giving?  What distinguishes the most effective causes and organizations? Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder and co-Executive Director of GiveWell, will describe how his organization is revolutionizing charity evaluation with completely transparent, rigorous analysis. Q&A to follow.

8 pm, Tuesday, Nov. 12; Sever 102

RSVP here

Elie Hassenfeld graduated from Columbia in 2004 and co-founded GiveWell in mid-2007 where he currently serves as co-Executive Director. GiveWell finds outstanding charity and publishes the full details of its analysis to help donors decide where to give. The Boston Globe has called GiveWell “The gold standard for giving” and its research has attracted attention from Peter Singer and other media. GiveWell has tracked over $10 million in donations to its recommendations as a direct result of its research.

HHIP: Friday, November 8: Peter Singer – Effective Altruism

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Harvard High Impact Philanthropy presents:

Peter Singer on Effective Altruism

Effective altruism is a new movement consisting of many individuals and several independent organizations, all focused on the deceptively simple idea that we should try to do as much good as we can. The existence of this movement raises many interesting questions, both practical and philosophical, which this talk will discuss.

Friday, November 8th; 4 – 5 PM, in Science Center D

RSVP to the event

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the Princeton University Center for Human Values and Laureate Professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He is well known for his philosophical work, as well as for his books – most recently including The Life You Can Save.
This event is co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund, as well as Harvard’s Departments of Economics and Philosophy.

Prof. Singer will also speak on “Ethics and Animals: Where Are We Now?” at 12 PM in Austin 200 (Ames Courtroom), 1515 Massachusetts Ave.

 

Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn highlights X-risk

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By Nir Eyal

Young people often assume that their life expectancies will remain what life expectancy is today—although life expectancy will grow by the time they are old. When all of us imagine our futures, we often neglect to take account of radical technologies which were not foreseeable prior to their invention, just as the internet wasn’t, and instead imagine something closer to present realities. We do not appreciate how different the future could be.

Among other things, the future might be dangerous to humankind in ways that we fail currently to appreciate. We got lucky, and nuclear energy seems hard for individuals to develop at home, but will that last, and will new WMDs be impossible to replicate with 3D printers or other future technologies? Can anyone guarantee that viruses manufactured for scientific research will not be spread by error or terror? Can we guarantee that robots designed for contained military purposes would not go out of control? Or that once artificial intelligence is advanced enough to design other artificial intelligence, humans will remain safe for long? Some of the greatest dangers to our species are unknown, simply because the technologies that create them have not been invented yet—just as many technologies that exist and threaten us today were not invented 100 years ago.

In a multimedia presentation that drew a prolonged applause from a crowd of Harvard undergraduates, Estonian programmer Jaan Tallin wove together three stories: the story of Kazaa and Skype, which he helped start; his personal journey into studying and promoting the study of existential risk; and a “sermon” (as he put it, tongue in cheek) on the ethical responsibilities of technology developers.

Tallin proposed taking active steps in anticipation of our future errors, both to make businesses robust and to keep our species safe in an opaque future: incorporating safety margins, and continually questioning one’s assumptions. He concluded by arguing, provocatively, that indispensable to both goals is having fun.

The talk was organized by the student organization Harvard High Impact Philanthropy (HHIP).

HHIP: Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, talks on responsible technology development

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So You Want to be a Technology Developer…

The roots of Skype go back to one email. If that email hadn’t been sent, the world today might be different. In general, technology development is not something that “just happens” — instead, it’s a result of particular actions by individual people. Moreover, the responsibility of technology developers must increase proportionally to the power of their creations. The talk sketches out a vision of what it means to be a responsible technology developer, using behind the scenes stories and videos from the early days of Skype development.

 Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype

Wednesday, October 30th

5:30 – 6:30 PM

Science Center A

RSVP to this event

The event is organized by Harvard HIP (High Impact Philanthropy).

Wednesday @ 8pm – Thomas Pogge: Effective Altruism or Mobilization for Institutional Reform?

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Harvard High-Impact Philanthropy presents

Effective Altruism or Mobilization for Institutional Reform?

a lecture by Thomas Pogge

Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University

Wednesday, October 9, 8 PM Sever 214

Professor Pogge will discuss whether some institutional reform efforts may be as effective or more effective than “effective altruism” and also whether effectiveness is the only standard by which such alternative ways of protecting people are to be compared.

Thomas Pogge is the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. Additionally, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo; a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University; and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire’s Centre for Professional Ethics. He is also an editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Planning on coming? RSVP here. 

May 22 (note new date): Dan Brock delivering the Gay Lecture on “The Future of Bioethics”

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Please join the Division of Medical Ethics for:

The 2013 George W. Gay Lecture in Medical Ethics

Dan W. Brock, PhD
Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Medical Ethics, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, HMS

“The Future of Bioethics”
Wednesday, May 22, 2013 (note new date)
4:00 PM

Harvard Medical School, Tosteson Medical Education Center

Carl W. Walter Amphitheater
260 Longwood Avenue, Boston

Please pass this invitation along to other interested friends and colleagues.
RSVP to  DME@hms.harvard.edu.

The George W. Gay Lecture is the oldest endowed lectureship at Harvard Medical School, and quite possibly the oldest medical ethics lectureship in the United States. The lectureship was established in 1917 by a $1,000 gift from Dr. George Washington Gay, an 1868 graduate of HMS. Since its inception, many of the nation’s most influential physicians, scientists, researchers and social observers, including Erich Fromm, Felix Frankfurter, Margaret Mead, Elizabeth Kübler Ross, E.O. Wilson, and Joshua Lederberg have given the Gay Lecture. Elie Wiesel, Marian Wright Edelman, Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof and Donald Berwick have given recent Gay Lectures.

 

Harvard HIP (High Impact Philanthropy): Toby Ord speaking tonight

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Are you interested in foreign aid, global development, medicine? Want to know how philanthropy and charitable giving can do the most good?

Aid Works (On Average) – By Toby Ord

Tuesday, March 26th; Emerson Hall 108; 8 PM

There is considerable controversy about whether foreign aid helps poor countries, with several prominent critics arguing that it doesn’t. Dr. Ord shows that these critics have only reached this conclusion because they have failed to count the biggest successes of aid, such as the eradication of smallpox, which have been in the sphere of global health rather than economic growth. These health successes have often been neglected in analysis of aid because they have only made up a small proportion of aid spending. When we look at the impact of this spending, though, we see that it the big wins have been so utterly vast that they more than justify all aid spending to date.

Dr. Toby Ord is a philosopher at the University of Oxford and a research associate at the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics and the Future of Humanity Institute. He is also the founder and director of Giving What We Can, an international society dedicated to eliminating poverty in the developing world.

Join Dr. Ord tonight, March 26, at 8 PM for a talk and discussion of the effectiveness of foreign aid. Refreshments will be provided, and a reception will follow.

Planning to come? Please RSVP on Facebook to help us plan refreshments.

March 28: Jessica Flanigan speaking to the HMS Division of Medical Ethics

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Please join the HMS Division of Medical Ethics for …

 

“Why patients should have access to all drugs without a prescription”

Jessica Flanigan, PhD

Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law

University of Richmond

Thursday, March 28, 2013; 4:00 – 5:30 PM

HMS Division of Medical Ethics

1st Floor Conference Room

641 Huntington Avenue, Boston

RSVP to DME@hms.harvard.edu

Jessica Flanigan is a philosopher whose research interests include the ethics of business and medicine, law, and public policy.  Her current research addresses the ethics of self-medication and looks at the obligations of business leaders, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, and questions the role of public officials. She asks questions such as: Can business leaders harm consumers simply by giving them more options? Do public officials misuse their power when they prohibit potentially dangerous drugs?  She is working on a book, Liberal Medicine, which is the first sustained philosophical inquiry into the ethics of medical regulations such as premarket safety and efficacy trials and the prescription drug system.