University of Virginia Library

Medical School Program Stresses Man's Survival

By MARILYN OGBURN

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A new program this year at the
University School of Medicine will
consider modern man and threats to his
survival, ranging from pollution to genetic
manipulation.

The program's chief designer, former
University Vice President of Medical
Affairs Dr. Thomas H. Hunter, described
it as a "bridge between the medical
school and the rest of the University."

Scholars and practitioners in medicine,
the basic sciences, government, law,
education and the humanities will be
brought together, according to Dr.
Hunter, "to help make the University a
problem solver for emerging human
needs."

Dr. Hunter, who is now Owen
Chatham Professor of Science, said that
the broad-ranging venture is one of
several interdisciplinary studies that have
been prompted by a growing concern in
science over how to cope with the impact
of technology on the quality of life.

He stated that "particularly in
medicine is this crisis acute. Medicine, as
all of science, has made such tremendous
advances in the last decades that we are
now faced with success problems, rather
than with failure problems."

"Consider just the area of
reproduction" he continued, "when it is
possible to separate baby-making from
love-making and to control inherited
characteristics of offspring, who decides
scientific policy?"

Other questions in human ecology that
affect the medical community, he
explained, include behavior control, both
chemical and electrical, and such socially
linked science quandaries as pollution,
poverty and overpopulation.

"The enormous problems facing
society in the next decades seem to defy
solution and even orderly study," the
medical educator remarked, "but it seems
to me that our future hope really lies in
drastic improvements in our educational
efforts at all levels."

A recent developmental grant from the
Commonwealth Fund of New York will
enable Dr. Hunter and his colleague, Dr.
Joseph Fletcher, who is visiting professor
medical ethics at the University, to meet
with leaders of the University community
and scientific experts across the nation to
plot program directions.

These plans will include
interdisciplinary courses mixing medicine
with fields such as law, engineering and
social philosophy.

An initial step in the program has been
the establishment of monthly Medicine
and Society Conferences which bring
together physicians, medical students and
laymen to discuss ethical problems
emerging in medicine.