He’s an ethicist who is the first call for complex, end-of-life decision-making. He’s a specialist in cross-cultural health care delivery. He’s an expert in genetics, genomics, cloning-animal ethics and emerging medical technologies. Oh, and in his off time, he travels to the depths of the Amazon and jungles of the Congo to help remote tribes deal with endangered species poaching. He’s even had to swim across lakes to cross borders in order to escape danger. Dr. Kerry Bowman is, quite simply, the most interesting man in the world, in our opinion. He’s a member of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Family and Community Medicine, the Joint Centre for Bioethics and the Centre for Environment, and the clinical ethicist for Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
Kerry took the time to sit down with us for a conversation on ethics and how to navigate complex problems and urgent decisions in a changing world.
What do you think?
- How do you think we should stick handle the ethical quandaries we face?
- Is it ethical to allow some species to go extinct simply because we don’t have the resources to save them?
- If we try to save everything, what happens if we spread our resources too thinly and we end up losing more species at risk?
- Should we play God? And who, at the end of the day, gets to play God?
- What factors should we consider when deciding what species to save?
- What are the social, cultural, economic and biological ramifications of these decisions?