A group of 100 medical ethicists, physicians and others calling themselves Pharmed Out have written the head of the National Institutes of Health and requested that the NIH fund studies examining the effect financial and industrial conflicts of interest have on medical research. Continue reading
Ethics Heroes
Ethics Hero: Hillary Clinton
In an interview in the current Vogue, Hillary Clinton explains how she became Secretary of State: Continue reading
Ethics Hero: Joe Girardi
I’m a life-time Boston Red Sox fan, and the New York Yankees winning anything is like a knife to my heart. Nevertheless, fair is fair. Joe Girardi, the Yankee manager, is an Ethics Hero for November.
Driving home from the Stadium after winning the World Series last night, Girardi stopped to help a motorist who had lost control of his car on the Cross Country Parkway and had crashed into a wall.
Girardi could have passed the buck, as most of us do in those situations. Lots of other cars would have an opportunity to help the driver, and Girardi had every reason to think he had done enough that night—a historic victory, a celebration, and now it was time to go home. It would have been easy to drive on. Nobody would know, nobody would criticize.
He did the right thing: Joe Girardi stopped to help a fellow human being in trouble. His choice had nothing to do with his being a New York celebrity, the manager of baseball’s most famous team and recently-crowned champion. It had to do with fulfilling his obligations as a citizen and a human being.
Today you’re my hero, Joe.
Just don’t expect me to be a Yankee fan.
Ethics Hero: Peter Shellem (1960-2009)
Newspapers are on the ropes these days, and sometimes I am not sorry. Even the best of them are too often sloppy, superficial, biased and incompetent. If they go down for the count, however, we will dearly miss the likes of Peter Shellem, an old-fashioned gum-shoe reporter who used his professional skills not only to find the truth, but to save lives in the process.
If you were not a regular reader of the Harrisburg, PA Patriot-News, the odds are that you never heard of Shellem. I hadn’t, until I read his New York Times’ obituary this morning. His passion was investigating the cases and prosecutions of convicted prisoners when something about their guilt didn’t seem quite right to him. The Times notes that Defense attorney Barry Scheck called Shellem ” a one man journalism innocence project.” Shellem’s investigations freed five wrongly convicted Americans, one of them who had been in jail 28 years, since he was fourteen.
A colleague at the Patriot-Ledger, in a remembrance, writes that Shellem did what he did because he was genuinely offended that our justice system could be so unjust. In this he was ahead of his time, for only recently, in the wake of the Duke lacrosse scandal, has the extent and impact of prosecutorial excesses begun to inspire the media and law enforcement to scrutinize past convictions and current prosecutions with due skepticism. There are more innocent people behind bars than we once believed, as well as many guilty prisoners who did not receive the rights guaranteed them as citizens. Peter Shellem didn’t help all of them directly, but his work did.
It appears that Peter Shellem committed suicide. Though he was apparently dissatisfied with his life, we should not be. His work was meaningful; his impact on the lives of others was profound, and his work set high ethical standards for us all. His credo: If you see a wrong, fix it. If you recognize injustice, expose it. If you detect corruption, stop it.
We should all aspire to follow his example.
