UNC Center for Bioethics

The mission of the UNC Center for Bioethics is to provide a core facility for collaborative capacity-building in bioethics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Biomedical research, public health planning, and health care practice all encounter increasingly complicated ethical challenges. We need robust responses to this complexity, and that requires the ability to integrate multiple perspectives in our planning and decision-making. The Center operates on the assumption that the most robust resolutions to bioethical questions in today’s world share five virtues: 1. They have interdisciplinary intellectual roots. 2. They are alive to an issue’s international and cross-cultural dimensions. 3. They are “translational” between theory and practice. 4. They incorporate a diversity of non-academic voices. 5. They are “street smart” about an issue’s social and political context. The Center’s goal is to promote work that displays these virtues, by providing intellectual “lab space” and core resources for local, national, and international faculty and students in pursuit of educational, research, or policy projects in bioethics. Beyond these aims, The Center’s topical scope, theoretical approaches, and research methods are “investigator-initiated,” reflecting the interests and needs of the collaborating scholars, rather than a pre-established thematic agenda.