**Event on Wednesday, November 7**

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Please join us for an evening with Charles Bernstein at Baruch College-CUNY.

There will be a reception at 5:30pm and the reading will go from 6 until 7pm.

Bernstein’s latest collections, Attack of the Difficult Poems and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, will be available for purchase.

Bioethics: Politics, Questions, Life

Bioethics is a term at least familiar to most of us—one of those “hot controversial” labels affixed to news stories with headlines like “First Synthetic Life Form Holds Promise, Peril” and “Superfood Surprise? The Dish on Gene Foods” (Breaking Bioethics, MSNBC). But, in today’s world, what does a term like “bioethics” really mean? What issues are umbrellaed by this term? As noted by the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences at Michigan State University, bioethics “has brought about significant changes in standards for the treatment of the sick and for the conduct of research…Our understanding of what is ethical has grown, but it is never complete.” Bioethics explores the difficult issues that confront us from the time of conception to the time of death. This learning community will explore the many ethical issues that seem to fall under “bioethics” and aim to engage in a larger conversation about how these questions of morality and judgment come into play in a wide range of texts. We will investigate texts including: Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him; and Arthur Caplan’s Breaking Bioethics columns. We will also take our inquiries outside of the traditional classroom—possibly visiting the Museum of Natural History, the Discovery Science Center, and attending relevant lectures.