Ronald Green

John Phillips Professor of ReligionDirector of the Ethics Institute

RELIGION PROFESSOR Ronald Green was up most of the night pondering an ethical dilemma. Fourteen thousand women had given blood for a major study of a breast cancer drug. Now another scientist wanted to test some of this blood for a genetic predisposition for the disease. Did the original consent forms still apply? And would the procedures that ensured anonymity in the first study prevent notification of subjects found to be at risk in the second?

Ronald Green, director of Dartmouth's Ethics Institute, had been asked for guidance on how—and whether—to proceed. "The research is of such value, but if you don't think through the details carefully you can sabotage the work, destroy people's lives, and bring shame upon yourself," says Green. (He ultimately concluded that the new study adequately protected both the subjects' rights and their health.) Such thorny questions are becoming more frequent for Green and his colleagues.

Since its founding in the early 1980s, the Ethics Institute has grown into a national resource for the study of professional ethics, developing standards to resolve the increasingly complex problems confronting doctors, engineers, executives.

Green's expertise in this area is helping to shape the na tional agenda. He is now serving an 18-month term as director of the Office of Genome Ethics at the National Institutes of Health, conceptualizing the myriad issues presented by the human genome research project. In this capacity he has created a federally funded, multidisciplinary course in the subject that was introduced at Dartmouth this summer. The first such course designed specifically for undergraduates (and for a select group of faculty from other schools) underscores the College's reputation as a teaching center.

Green