Bioethics Showcase Features New Play, Undergraduate Scholarship

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April 10, 2017 – A play about a white woman who contemplates donating a liver to a black woman with whom she has a common, slave-owning ancestor, was part of the third-annual Undergraduate Bioethics Research Showcase last week.
Hosted by Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE), the showcase is a juried exhibition of student work focused on ethical issues in health, the environment and emerging technologies.
This year, in addition to showcasing such work, a group of Georgetown students, alumni and local actors performed a stage reading of “A Pound of Flesh,” a new play written by Katie Watson and directed by Anita Maynard-Losh of D.C.’s Arena Stage.
Ongoing Conversation
“The play uses living liver donation as a framework to explore the issues of what we owe to one another and whether reparative justice is possible,” says showcase founder Laura Bishop, associate teaching professor and academic program manager at KIE. 
It also mirrors the conversation at Georgetown on slavery, memory and reconciliation.”
Watson is an award-winning teacher of bioethics, law, and medical humanities at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and teaches creative writing and improv at Chicago’s Second City.
She flew in from Chicago for the performance and remained for a panel discussion and Q&A with the audience. Watson was joined by Robert Veatch, a Georgetown professor emeritus of medical ethics and prominent scholar on ethics and policy issues surrounding organ donation and transplantation at KIE, and Samantha Harnack, living donor transplant coordinator at MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute.
"From its inception, the Bioethics Showcase has included an arts event," Bishop says. "We've found that when we use the lens of the arts to approach a complex, real-world problem, we walk away with a more complete understanding of the thorniness of the problem, its profound impact on the people involved and its import for all of us in ...

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