Building a Community of Scholars Centered on Justice-Centered Bioethics Research

Abstract: Emerging biotechnologies raise profound ethical challenges that demand renewed engagement with justice frameworks in bioethics. While calls to center justice in ethical inquiry have increased, bioethics scholarship and training remain insufficient. This panel shares lessons learned from creating a scholarly cohort focused on justice frameworks, with case studies in genomics, AI, data science, and medical device research. The first presenter provides insights from building the cohort across disciplines, career stages, and institutions, and highlights strategies for dialogue, mentorship, and collaboration. This is followed by cohort members’ discussion of applying frameworks to specific bioethics research. The second presentation applies epistemic injustice frameworks to examine equitable benefit-sharing challenges in genomics, including profit distribution from secondary use of biobank cells without explicit consent. It explores how knowledge production and decision-making structures impact just allocation of benefits. The third presentation examines the Open-Source Artificial Pancreas System (Open APS), a grassroots patient-driven initiative formed in response to regulatory and clinical constraints of commercial biotechnologies. This presentation applies epistemic justice and algorithmic justice frameworks to investigate how experiential knowledge systems and social hierarchies are encoded into medical devices such as the automated insulin delivery system. The fourth presentation describes tradeoffs that investigators commonly make in AI-developed for biomedical research, detailing examples of team decision-making that compromise fairness and proposing how frameworks discussed by the cohort can inform governance mechanisms for maximizing fairness when weighing tradeoffs. The panel demonstrates how justice frameworks can redefine bioethics inquiry and professional practice, and the impact on scholarly community building.

Keywords: Justice, Biotechnology, Multi-disciplinarity