Roberto Dell'Oro 6/12/06
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Pondering Life and Death Dilemmas
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Assistant professor Roberto Dell'Oro and his colleagues and students at The Bioethics Institute consider the great moral and medical questions of this, and every, era.
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"Why are we pursuing science and why are we pursuing cures?” asks Dr. Roberto Dell’Oro, assistant professor of bioethics and graduate director of LMU’s master of arts program in bioethics.
"How far should we go in that, and what are the extensions of our possibilities?" Dell'Oro continues. "And what are limitations that we need to put on our possibilities for our own sake, for the sake of our humanity?"
These are the sorts of astounding, intractable and oftentimes, seemingly unsolvable medical and moral quandaries addressed daily by Dell'Oro, his colleagues, and the students enrolled in the The Bioethics Institute, a six-year-old enterprise based in University Hall.
Stem cell research, gene therapy, cloning, physician-assisted suicide, and health care reform are among the hot-button issues that fall under the bioethics purview.
"The [students] touch upon the fundamental philosophical and theological questions that have to do with the problem of, what does it mean to be human? And what are the ends of medicine?" Dell'Oro says.
LMU's bioethics curriculum requires students to take courses in core bioethics, general ethics, philosophical ethics, and theology ethics. Students consider theoretical implications while sitting in classrooms; meanwhile, field work options include spending time in the intensive care and the prenatal intensive care units of St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, Calif., and St. Vincent Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles. There, students witness the hardest of choices being made by health care providers and families – literally, life and death decisions.
Some of The Bioethics Institute's students are doctors, nurses and other health care professionals, Dell'Oro says. Others are LMU liberal arts undergrads or graduate students.
Whatever their backgrounds and aspirations, it is clear that LMU is an ideal home for such a program.
"The fact that there is a program like this in a Jesuit, Catholic university is very much coherent with the intellectual tradition of a Catholic university," Dell'Oro says. “There’s the need to bring together faith and reason; the need to bring together the reflection of philosophy, theology and science in an interdisciplinary fashion."