Recording of Author Meets Critics Event on The Perils of Partnership Available

A recording of the October 17 Author Meets Critics on The Perils of Partnership is now available on the Penn State Bioethics Program YouTube Channel.

The event focused on a recent book, The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2019) by Jonathan H. Marks, director of the Penn State Bioethics Program. It also featured two distinguished critics: 

• Lisa M. Lee, former executive director of President Obama’s Bioethics Commission and current associate vice president for scholarly integrity and research compliance at Virginia Tech, and
• Leland Glenna, Penn State professor of rural sociology.

Organized by the Rock Ethics Institute, it was the inaugural event in the Author Meets Critics series. The Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts Clarence Lang offered opening remarks, and Ted Toadvine, director of the Rock Ethics Institute and associate professor of philosophy, served as moderator.

Professor Marks provided insights from his book about the dangers of government agencies trying to address the opioid crisis, the obesity epidemic, and other public health challenges by partnering with the very corporations responsible for creating or exacerbating these problems.  He also offered a novel framework for addressing the ethical challenges posed by public-private partnerships. Both Lee and Glenna gave responses to the book and potential solutions to these conflicts.

The Penn State event cosponsors were the Bioethics Program, the Department of Philosophy, the School of Public Policy, the College of the Liberal Arts, the College of Health and Human Development, the School of International Affairs, and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.