Must be a good time to be at the University of Chicago. Another medical student/faculty combo has put out a fairly high profile paper, this one about religion and doctors and morality and conscience—above all, how clinicians disagree over precisely what conscience is from the context of religion versus secularism. It’s all very deep and—well, I’ll just repost the abstract for you to ponder. The whole thing is here (subscription required).

What role should the physician’s conscience play in the practice of medicine? Much controversy has surrounded the question, yet little attention has been paid to the possibility that disputants are operating with contrasting definitions of the conscience. To illustrate this divergence, we contrast definitions stemming from Abrahamic religions and those stemming from secular moral tradition. Clear differences emerge regarding what the term conscience conveys, how the conscience should be informed, and what the consequences are for violating one’s conscience. Importantly, these basic disagreements underlie current controversies regarding the role of the clinician’s conscience in the practice of medicine. Consequently participants in ongoing debates would do well to specify their definitions of the conscience and the reasons for and implications of those definitions. This specification would allow participants to advance a more philosophically and theologically robust conversation about the means and ends of medicine.

This is yet another publication from Ryan Lawrence, a second-year student here, and Farr Curlin, an internist, ethicist, and (almost uncomfortably) outspokenly religious researcher of the role of religion in medicine (but overall a very thoughtful and very good guy). At this point, he’s perhaps the best known researcher on this topic in the country. Together, the two published five articles in 2007 alone, once in NEJM and thrice in AJOB, twice just with the two of them and thrice with other collaborators. Let’s just say it was a good year for them.

In addition, a great Cancer Research paper just came out of my lab on the role of paxillin in lung cancer, culminating several years’ worth of hard work and a hell of a lot of outside collaboration. You should check it out (subscription required, I believe).