TODAY news - Apr 24, 2003 - Faculty of Religion news

Thursday, April 24, 2003 TODAY

Faculty of Religion news

10th annual bioethics conference held

Mark Carr, PhD, MDiv, theological co-director and associate professor, Center for Christian Bioethics, welcomes the attendees to the annual bioethics conference.

Jesse Gelsinger was a normal teenager who enjoyed riding motorcycles, hanging out with friends and working part-time. However, he also suffered from a very rare metabolic disorder, ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency syndrome (OTC). In September, 1999, a clinical trial went awry and Jesse suffered irreparable brain damage. His vital organs were all shutting down. Upon consideration, the family chose to take Jesse off of life support.

Paul Gelsinger, Jesse’s father, was one of several guest speakers for “Promise and Peril of the New Genetics,” the annual bioethics conference presented by the Center for Christian Bioethics and the Center for Spiritual Life & Wholeness.

Mr. Gelsinger’s moving story of the importance of protection of patients in medical research brought the argument of new genetics to a personal level.

The conference, held in Wong Kerlee International Conference Center on March 2 to 3, focused on how society deals with ethics in modern medical science in health care.

More than 50 attendees participated in the conference.

Michael D. West, PhD, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., Worcester, Massachusetts, provided the keynote presentation for the conference with “Human Therapeutic Cloning: Challenges and Opportunities.”

California State Senator Dede Alpert (D–San Diego) was also on hand to introduce the California Senate Select Committee on Genetics, Genetic Technologies, and Public Policy and other human cloning and stem cell legislation.

Conference presenter Paul Gelsinger, vice president of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research, tells the story of his son, Jesse.

Mr. Gelsinger is the vice president of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research (CIRCARE), an organization devoted to protecting human subjects in research and medical treatment. Mr. Gelsinger testified before the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Subcommittee in 2000, and he addressed a meeting of the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee in 2002. Working with the National Organization for Rare Disorders, he helped produce a booklet on OTC. He was deeply involved with making the German documentary titled, “Why Did Jesse Have to Die?”

A Powerpoint presentation was shown of Jesse throughout his life, as Mr. Gelsinger spoke about the aspects of being a parent through the process, the interactions with physicians and specialists, belief of possible genetic advancements, and the belief that all was being done for the best interest of Jesse.

However, once reviewing documents and consulting with those involved in the clinical trial experiments and Jesse’s trial specifically, Mr. Gelsinger came upon harrowing facts that were never disclosed to the family or to Jesse. There were vast ethical discrepancies, including conflicts of interest and financial investments, a former nurse of Jesse’s resigning because her questions were not being answered by those involved in the clinical trial, and overall lack of protection of Jesse in the process of medical research.

The Center for Christian Bioethics and the Center for Spiritual Life & Wholeness sponsor the bioethics conference each year and invite professionals from the health-care field to focus on various topics dealing with bioethics. Next year’s conference will be held in March.

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Employee spiritual care & wholeness presents new lunch-time seminar series

Shirani de Alwis-Chand, EdD, director of the Teaching Learning Center at Loma Linda University, shares a humorous story with the audience at the first of a lunch-time series called Live and Learn.

Developing a positive outlook can be as simple as smiling at a stranger you pass in the hall, says Shirani de Alwis-Chand, EdD, director of the Teaching Learning Center at Loma Linda University. Dr. Alwis-Chand gave a lunch-time presentation on how to cultivate a positive outlook in everyday life to a group of Loma Linda University Medical Center employees on April 3.

Living in an age of anxiety, as Dr. Alwis-Chand calls it, it is easy to incorporate negative thoughts into routine activities. She showed some research results revealing that an average of 40,000 thoughts run through the human brain each day. It is estimated that nearly 80 percent of those thoughts are negative.

“ The main thing in life is to not worry,” she emphasized in her presentation. The key to this is to reframe negative thoughts into win-win situations. If you don’t, stress hormones can harm the brain says Dr. Alwis-Chand. These hormones can be responsible for severing connections and inhibiting memory function. She listed other physiological manifestations of stress. Anxious people tend to rely on alcohol more, are more susceptible to colds, suffer more frequent heart attacks, and statistically have more accidents than their calmer counterparts.

The good news is that there are steps you can take to ensure a positive outlook. Good stress management is based on a daily commitment. Dr. Alwis-Chand has experienced personal loss and knows this on an intimate level. She lost her husband of 24 years to liver cancer and has also experienced the loss of three of her children. She notes that the only way she dealt with the situation was to take each day at a time. From it she learned that every crisis has an opportunity.

At the end of her presentation, Dr. Alwis-Chand gave a short list of things to do to build a positive outlook. This list included the ability to make peace with imperfection; accept the fact that life isn’t fair; to be aware of your moods and recognize your pain; to remember that life isn’t an emergency; and most importantly to develop compassion.

Dr. Alwis-Chand closed with scripture, found in Isaiah 49:16, “I have inscribed you on the palms of My hand.”

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Thursday, April 24, 2003 TODAY