Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) is honoring Johnson & Johnson with its 2017 Ethical Leadership Award on January 30 for its ethical work in collaboration with the Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project and New York University.
FASPE is a non-profit organization that provides ethics education for professional school students by incorporating trips to Auschwitz and other sites where Nazi-era doctors, lawyers, executives, journalists, and clergy worked. By invoking the power of place as an instructive tool to emphasize the importance of ethical behavior in these professions, FASPE offers students the opportunity to intensively explore ethical dilemmas in history that are still relevant today.
“The medical students who have gone on FASPE trips reported that the experience is life-changing,” said Nancy Angoff, MD, MPH, associate dean for student affairs. “They’re able to make connections very easily to situations that they encounter in the practice of medicine today.”
“It’s a totally different way of teaching ethics that presents an opportunity to explore issues on a deeper level,” said Mark Mercurio, MD, MA, professor of pediatrics (neonatology) and director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics. Both Angoff and Mercurio have been involved with FASPE since its inception in 2009. Today, there are nearly 400 FASPE alumni from institutions across the United States.
Michael Otremba, MD ’12, a resident in otolaryngology head and neck surgery at Yale who worked on curriculum development and went on the first FASPE trip in 2009, said that FASPE teaches students to take a step back and look beyond their careers and the science behind their work to focus on the patients with whom they interact. “Those extra moments of appreciating what they’re going through are really important,” he noted.
The Ethical Leadership Award will be presented to Johnson & Johnson on January 30 in New York City for its work with the YODA Project and its collaboration with the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University School of Medicine on a pilot program to address challenges associated with compassionate access to medicines. YODA advocates for the responsible sharing of clinical research data, open science, and research transparency. Johnson & Johnson began partnering with YODA in 2014 in a groundbreaking collaboration that makes results widely available to researchers from clinical trials of the the company’s medical devices and diagnostics businesses.
The award highlights the fact that while the ethical dilemmas faced by physicians today may differ from those that were relevant during World War II, the lessons learned during that era present a compelling framework for issues faced by individuals and companies every day.