The Professors' Professor: The American Students of August Krogh

This paper examines the creation and development of an international social network between physiologists in Denmark and the United States in the period 1907-1939. At the center of the network was the Danish physiologist and 1920 Nobel Laureate August Krogh and his Zoophysiological Laboratory at the University of Copenhagen. In total, sixteen Americans were visiting researchers at the Zoophysiological Laboratory until 1939, and more than half of them were at some point in their career affiliated with Harvard University. For many of them, their visit would be the start of a long-term connection with Krogh and the broader network. This paper shows how the American visitors, Krogh, and the Zoophysiological Laboratory benefitted from being part of this network of top researchers in physiology and medicine. The visits themselves provided the Zoophysiological Laboratory with intellectual stimulus and more manpower for its research, while the American visitors received training and developed research ideas. Beyond the visits, the network gave the members, especially the central figures such as August Krogh, access to advice, job offers, funding and travel opportunities.

A theory of international bioethics: the negotiable and the non-negotiable

The preceding article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal presents the argument that "moral fundamentalism," the position that international bioethics rests on "basic" or "fundamental" moral prinicples that are universally accepted in all eras and cultures, collapses under a variety of multicultural and postmodern critiques. The present article looks to the contractarian tradition of Hobbes and Locke -- as reinterpreted by David Gauthier, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls -- for an alternative justification for international bioethics. Drawing on the central themes of this tradition, it is argued that international bioethics can be rationally reconstructed as a negotiated moral order that respects culturally and individually defined areas of nonnegotiability. Further, the theory of a negotiated moral order is consistent with traditional ideals about human rights, is flexible enough to absorb the genuine insights of multiculturalism and postmodernism, and yet is strong enough to justify transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments, including the condemnation of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg. This theory also is consistent with the history of the ethics of human subjects experimentation and offers insights into current controversies such as the controversy over changing the consent rule for experiments in emergency medicine and the controversy over exempting certain clinical trials of inexpensive treatments for preventing the perinatal transmission of AIDS from the ethical standards of the sponsoring country.

Teaching medicine as a human experience: a patient-doctor relationship course for faculty and first-year medical students

We developed a required, longitudinal course for first-year medical students that addressed the patient-doctor relationship. Our course linked understanding patients' experiences and perspectives on illness with listening to, talking with, and establishing a rapport with patients while obtaining their medical histories. Learning was enhanced by use of an interdisciplinary faculty and by small-group continuity and faculty mentoring. Our curriculum adapted problem-based, self-directed educational methods to convey medical humanism. We focused on bedside interviewing as the means for exploring patients' social, emotional, and ethical concerns.

The integrity of the scientific literature

A case of admitted scientific fraud has shed new light on the system that ensures the integrity of the scientific literature. Certain lapses from generally accepted standards of research may be more frequent than is commonly believed.

Coping with fraud

The tardiness of actions by Harvard officials when faced with confessed fraudulent research conducted by John Darsee is contrasted with the more rapid responses by authorities in the cases of William T. Summerlin (Sloan-Kettering) and Vijay Soman (Yale).