2011 - Dr. Christine Harrison and Kathleen Glass

A collage of praise from your colleagues…

Dr Christine Harrison has had a profound influence on the field of bioethics in general and pediatric bioethics specifically. She has been an exemplary bioethicist and effective and inspiring Director of the Ethics Department at the Hospital for Sick Children for fifteen years. Dr. Harrison, is a pioneer that navigated the complex territory carved out by the conflicts that arise in the pediatric health care setting with unparralled ease and dexterity. Her ongoing commitment to ethical practice in patient care has been evidenced through her very willingness to provide guidance whenever and wherever needed. Since 1980s, Dr. Harrison has shaped a virtual cultural shift at the Hospital for Sick Children where Bioethics evolved into an integral and welcome component of patient care. Her leadership in integrating bioethics as a daily component of patient care has been truly inspiring.

Her students consider her a phenomenal mentor. Dr. Harrison's education role has embraced many individuals across the U of T and Sick Kids communities, including undergraduate and graduate students, ethics interns, research assistants, post-doctoral fellows, and colleagues. She has spearheaded the continuing education of staff, residents, and physicians--and educated members of the public through community talks, newsletter publications, and radio, television, and newspaper interviews. To her students, Dr. Harrison has the ability to make the most complex concepts and issues clear, to provide answers to difficult questions, and to help students formulate good questions. Her thoughtful, collaborative, intelligent approach in critically analyzing situations always includes integrity. Moreover, her humanity makes her convictions that much more accessible as her warmth, compassion and sense of humour are always evident. At the same time Dr. Harrison never hesitates to state her concerns or perspectives even when challenging the status quo: and she is equally adept at presenting all sides of an issue to ensure that things were really thought through. Lasting legacies of her educational endeavour rest also in the clinical ethics educational materials, guidelines and policy she has developed.

Dr. Harrison is a leader in the truest sense of the word. She is highly regarded by national and international colleagues. Her work in ethics, while primarily in Canada, has extended to the US and internationally--as far reaching as Taiwan. Since 1995, she has been involved in several funded research projects focusing on clinical ethics and research ethics. She has sat on over 100 committees related to ethics practice, education and research, she has held major appointments in Bioethics, and has many medical and non-medical adjunct and cross appointment to major Universities in Canada and one in the USA. She is also a tremendous scholar publishing many book chapters and articles including a landmark work in clinical ethics on the topic of medical decision-making for children. Additionally for nearly two decades, Dr. Harrison has been an active member and leader at the Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB) and, prior to 1995, the Centre for Bioethics. She is considered the most experienced senior member and top role model of the Clinical Organizational and Research Ethics Network at the JCB, a terrific mentor, and someone from whom to seek sage feedback and advice.

Dr. Harrison has made important and ongoing contributions to the CBS. She has had the longest possible history of active involvement with the CBS given she became a member in 1988, the year the CBS was founded. She was a Regional Advisory Council Member in 1990 and, after serving in this role for five years, became its chair. She served as CBS President from 2000-2002. In addition, she has regularly taken on the demanding role of chairing and co-chairing CBS conferences and pre-conferences. She was instrumental in helping CBS overcome challenges and set the stage for CBS current successes. "She was a bright light for me", one nominee writes –"always enthusiastic, supportive of CBS, and ready to contribute her knowledge and skills, and more importantly, her wisdom."
In short, "Dr. Harrison is the living instantiation of what it means to be a bioethicist." It is remarkable not only that she has made so many contributions, but also that she's spread them so equitably across the four key areas of practice, education, scholarship, and service.

Dr Kathleen Glass is an effective and influential leader in Canadian Bioethics.  She has been supported by a steady stream of peer-reviewed grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and other major funders.  She has been principal or co-investigator on research grants totaling over $35 Million dollars.  She has published many journal articles in prestigious journals nationally and internationally on the topics of the law related to research ethics.  She is considered a leading champion in the field of Clinical Equipoise, was at the vanguard of developing systematic ethical and legal thinking around genetic technologies and has published numerous articles on research in subjects lacking legal competence. Dr. Glass has been an inspiration in helping us understand and develop ethical care and research for children. She has presented many papers at national and international conferences

Throughout the course of her career Dr. Glass has worked assiduously to advance the profile of bioethics and bioethicists.  She served as the acting director of NCEHR, and as a member of the National Placebo Initiative.  She made substantial and sustained contributions to the Canadian Bioethics Society (CBS) as a member of the Executive Committee and as a member at large, as chair of the nominating committee and as a member of the Lifetime Achievement Awards Committee.    She has also served on several other International committees.

In terms of leadership, upon her recent retirement, Kathleen was a full professor in the Departments of Pediatrics as well as Human Genetics.  Thanks to her leadership, the Clinical Trials Group at McGill University remains one of the foremost research groups examining the ethics of clinical trials in the world.  It is fair to say the bioethics at McGill University thrived under the steady hand of Prof. Glass’s leadership. An enormous accomplishment has been her leadership of the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill, a post she held for a decade until her recent retirement.  She nurtured young trainess, recruited talented scholars and did so with quiet determination and a focus on excellence---two traits she brought to all her endeavours. In addition she was invited as a keynote speaker to diverse groups and societies because of her unique expertise and training.

Prof Glass has influenced a generation of bioethicists through her outstanding commitment to teaching, supervising a large number of graduate students and fellows. She is a conscious, generous and committed mentor and a number of her students have already gone on to make significant contributions to bioethics in Canada. Prof Glass taught bioethics and research ethics to law students, medical students, residents, clinical ethics trainees and colleagues. She has exceptional qualities as a teacher, mentor and scholar.  One student writes “Her impressive knowledge, her clear, well thought-out and intelligent views on numerous issues, her always lucid vision and extraordinary mind are all qualities she possesses that have allowed me to develop my own academic rigour, as well as sharpen my critical thinking in the bioethics field.  In addition to being an exemplary teacher for me, Dr. Glass has acted as a mentor. Her patience, devotion, interest, humility, humanism and sense of justice have contributed enormously to the success of my doctoral studies.”

In terms of clinical practice, Dr. Glass made extraordinary contributions to the Montreal Children’s Hospital in her role as Clinical Ethicist She offered many years of exceptional service as clinical ethicist, teacher, researcher, and made generous contributions to the Pediatric Ethics Committee as well as to the Research Ethics Board. She has been an inspiration in helping colleagues understand and develop ethical care and research for children at the MCH.

Dr. Glass’s work-whether in scholarship, mentoring, or service has always had a palpable sensitivity and humanity. Her ability to engage others who held different views is quite remarkable.  She invites critics to reexamine their arguments in a manner that facilitates rather than retards progress.  In addition to her exceptional scholarly achievements, Dr. Glass has been such an important source of moral values. She has taught us by example – she has exemplified Integrity in all aspects of her work.  

“In my opinion”, one nominee states, “Dr. Glass is an exceptional woman and merits recognition and honours.”

2009 - Michael McDonald

Three Sayings

By Michael McDonald

I was genuinely surprised when I received the note from Canadian Bioethics Society President Paddy Rodney that I was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for 2009. It was especially gratifying to receive the news from Paddy, who is a former student. I am most grateful to my colleagues in the CBS for this award. Thank you especially to those who put my name in for nomination. I have learned so much from all of you over the many years I have been associated with the CBS.

This occasion calls for appropriate remarks. But speaking as a philosopher, I cannot resist the inclination to offer a prolegomenon or a set of meta-remarks to set out my criteria for a speech that is appropriate on receipt of such an honour. I believe there are three criteria. First, the remarks must be relatively brief – we have been in sessions for nearly two full days and are reaching the super-saturated point. Second, the award is given following lunch so one’s remarks should be digestible and not spoil the meal. Third
and most challengingly, acceptance remarks must show some wit, but also display some seriousness.

An anecdote

So I begin with an anecdote. Years ago when I was in the Philosophy Department at the University of Waterloo, my then senior colleague and still close friend Rolf George told me a story about a conversation he had on a flight to his sabbatical in Germany. His seatmate asked what Rolf did. Rolf said that he was a philosopher. “Ah a philosopher”, said the seatmate, “Tell me some of your sayings.”

With his droll sense of humour, Rolf came back with the idea that each philosopher should develop some of his or her own sayings. Perhaps, Rolf suggested, faculty members could post their sayings on their office doors for potential students to contemplate.

Now this story may sound a bit strange to non-philosophers, but I find it most natural. I recall my first philosophy course which was in ancient philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1961-2. In that year-long course, we spent an entire term studying the very cryptic sayings of pre-Socratic philosophers who left only fragments of their work. As I recall, Thales talked about the composition of the universe claiming that everything is made of water. Heraclitus spoke about the nature of time and cryptically remarked that one can’t step into the same river twice. I also have now rather dim memories that Parmenides worried about existence or the nature of being, but what remains fixed in my mind is that his followers, the Pythagoreans eschewed eating beans – thus linking being to non-bean. All this was done before we were allowed to read Plato and Aristotle. As students, we were very grateful for finally having readings with premises and conclusions
rather than cryptic sayings.

Nonetheless, sayings have their place, and one of these places is just such an occasion. Sayings are not arguments. To one person, a particular saying may appear highly insightful, while to another it may seem like empty rhetoric. This is because sayings are context sensitive. So take into account this context – the receipt of an award at the CBS. I can then dispense with the standard philosophical qualification “ceteris paribus” or “other things being equal” and climb out on a rhetorical limb.

I have three sayings from my life experience in ethics and bioethics.

My first saying is that in ethics, what seems most obvious may be the most difficult and important to understand and act upon.

I found this in the work that I have done in research ethics particularly when I was a member and Deputy Chair of the Tri-Council Working Group on Ethics (TCWG) in the mid-1990’s. I served on the Working Group with a number of distinguished academics including the late Doug Kinsella who served as President of the CBS. The Working Group produced the document that eventually became in 1998 the Tri-Council Policy Statement on the Ethical Conduct of Research Involving Humans. The tumultuous history of this paper is chronicled in a paper that I have just published in the Health Law Review
(April 2009).

In this process, what shocked (and saddened) me was that most of the interventions and comments on our work were about the situation of researchers and how they might be disadvantaged by our formulation of research ethics norms. In the literally hundreds of pages of comments, we heard very little (outside the bioethics community) about the rights and interests of research participants, but we had numerous complaints and concerns about the rights and interests of researchers. I came to realize that the voices of research subjects were seldom, if ever, heard; while the voices of the researchcommunity
and sponsors dominated the correspondence and protection processes.

As we conversed with the research community, I realized that researchers had made assumptions about the burden of proof. The common view was that it was the responsibility of the TCWG and critics of current practices to show that something was wrong with the then current arrangements for research governance. It seemed obvious to me that the burden of proof lay on the research community to show that research subjects were effectively protected. This insight led to the work that I led on our report to the Law Commission of Canada in 2000. In that report we noted that while research ethics abounds with norms and procedures there is really no attempt to garner evidence of effectiveness of those norms and processes.

In the work that I have done on research ethics since that time, I have come to realize that on paper what happens to research participants is supposed to be central to research ethics norms. However, almost no one really systematically tracks the experiences of research subjects. This simple and obvious insight led to our current research project on the experiences of research subjects.

Finally, I have noted that while research ethics is profoundly shaped by its history, we as Canadians study and invoke the US history of human research protection but typically ignore our own history and situation as Canadians.

My point in all this is that in puzzling through the often controversial process we had in the lead up to the Tri-Council Policy Statement, I was led to think very hard about how we in Canada govern human research protection. With colleagues I have launched multiple research projects, including research into governance and into the experiences of research participants, to address what seems like the most obvious and yet mostneglected questions. It has led me to argue in favour of an evidence-based system of Canadian human research protection in both academic and policy forums.

Finally, I want to say that research ethics is a crucial part of bioethics. It is essential for those who work in this area make it a prominent part of each CBS meeting. It is also essential that we engage in serious scholarship on the history of the Canadianexperience in human research protection.

My second saying is that before there can be occupants, someone has to build the house.

Let me offer some examples of building the house of bioethics from my career. One was the creation of the applied ethics strategic research theme at SSHRC that funded work in bioethics and other areas of applied ethics in the late 1980s and 1990s. This was only possible through a concerted effort on the part of several bioethicists including Sue Sherwin, and Abby Ann Lynch as well as my research assistant at that time Daryl Pullman. A second is the work that many of us did to ensure that when CIHR was created ethics was a cornerstone of its foundation that is even a part of its legislated mandate. Another was in the creation of the highly interdisciplinary W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia. I was also privileged to be part of the movement that brought about the integration of social sciences into bioethics. Finally I would mention the CIHR ethics training program that our Centre has had with Dalhousie University.

My point here is that many of the things that we now take for granted were not always there. Someone has to build the house before there is a roof over our heads. We need institution builders. This requires entrepreneurship and creative partnership working for the common good. The items that I mention were not things that I could have done on my own. They required a shared effort and putting aside personal ambitions and partisan agendas.

My third saying is to be passionate and thoughtful, but above all be compassionate.

What we do in bioethics should ultimately matter to patients, families, research participants, our community and our world. We should be making a positive difference for their lives as well as our own. Bioethics requires thoughtfulness and insight. The issues we engage with are intellectually and practically difficult.

We will encounter resistance because what we say will threaten the comfortable and powerful. As bioethicists we need to have the courage of our convictions and not only speak truth to power but demand that the powerful be truthful. That is not easy and is certainly not, in my experience, without personal cost. In difficult moments it is crucial to have supportive colleagues. I have been blessed with these particularly in the Centre, on the Tri-Council Working Group, the CIHR Standing Committee on Ethics and in other circumstances.

But above all I urge you to be compassionate. Two years ago I was shocked to learn that I had a serious cardiac problem. I was no longer the ethics consultant and teacher walking into the hospital, but a patient with an ill fitting gown and a fear-filled mind. My family physician said to me that perhaps I would learn something from this experience that would be useful in my work as a bioethicist. She was right about this. I did learn something from family, friends and caregivers as well as fellow cardiac patients. What I learned is the importance of compassion and caring.

As bioethicists we have the intellectual platform and practical opportunities to inspire and nurture a culture of compassion in health care and health research. I urge you tocontinue
to take such occasions with the passion that they deserve.

So these are my sayings.

I trust that I have not over-burdened the occasion or your digestion. I hope that these saying will either have resonated with you or, if not, have pushed you into useful indignation. A good feature of sayings is that they are not really arguments but hints at ways of life. They require some sharing of life experience and that is what I have tried to do on this occasion. Finally thank you again for this wonderful award.

2008 - Nuala Kenny, O.C., M.D., FRCPC

The CBS Lifetime Achievement Award is given annually to an individual whose demonstrated scholarship and/ or leadership has contributed significantly to health care ethics in Canada. The committee is pleased to announce that this year’s recipient of the CBS Lifetime Achievement Award is Dr. Nuala Kenny. Please join us at the award ceremony at noon on Friday, June 20 as Dr.Kenny reflects on her experiences within the Canadian Bioethics Society.

Nuala Kenny, O.C., M.D., FRCPC was born in New York and entered the Sisters of Charity of Halifax in 1962. She received her BA, Magna Cum Laude, from Mount Saint Vincent University in l967 and an MD from Dalhousie in 1972. She did postgraduate training in pediatrics at Dalhousie University and Tufts-New England Medical Centre, during which she held a Killam Scholarship. In l975, she became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physician and Surgeons of Canada and in 1976 was certified by the American Board of Pediatrics. She has received Honorary Doctorates from Mount Saint Vincent (1992), the Atlantic School of Theology (2000), Regis College, Toronto School of Theology (2000), St. Francis Xavier University (2000) and College of New Rochelle (2008). In 1999 was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

After an extensive career in pediatrics and medical education, Dr. Kenny founded the Department of Bioethics at Dalhousie in 1996. She now devotes herself to bioethics full-time. Her areas of research interest in ethics include: physician ethics, ethics education for physicians with particular attention to role-modeling, ethics and health policy at all levels, pediatric ethics and end of life care. At present, she is a mentor in the CIHR Training Grant in the Ethics of Research and Policy, the PI of "Pandemic Planning and Foundational Questions of Justice, the Common Good and the Public Interest" (CIHR), Co-PI (with Mita Giacomini of CHEPA, McMaster) of "Ethical Frameworks for Health Policy: Apprisal, Appraisal and Application" (CIHR), Co-Investigator of "Building a Public Dialogue for Defining the Medicare Basket" (CHSRF) and "Health Policy Ethics Enhancing Equity" (CIHR).

Dr. Kenny is internationally recognized as a medical educator and lecturer on fundamental ethics questions in health care and policy. In 2002, she completed her first book, "What Good is Health Care? Reflections on the Canadian Experience". In addition to her academic work, Dr. Kenny is regularly involved in policy deliberations, particularly in relation to values and Canadian medicare.

She is a public member of the Health Council of Canada and on the Board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare and has served on the Committees on Biomedical Ethics of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and the Canadian Pediatric Society. She was a founding member of the National Council for Bioethics in Human Research and has served on the Tri-Council Working Group on Revision of Guidelines for Research with Human Subjects and the National Science Advisory Board. She was Chair of the Values Committee of the Prime Minister's National Forum on Health and is Past President of both the Canadian Pediatric Society and the Canadian Bioethics Society.

She was a founding member of the Governing Council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and also chaired the Working Group on Ethics in the new CIHR.