The Invisible Costs of Saving a Life | Bioethics Grand Rounds

Please join the Bioethics and Humanities department for a Bioethics Grand Rounds presentation by Katherine Standefer, MFA on "The Invisible Costs of Saving a Life."

Click here to join via Zoom

In this presentation, Katherine Standefer, MFA will unfold some of the complex ethical supply chain considerations relevant to manufacturing medical technologies, drawing on the research she completed for her book, Lightning Flowers, which attempts to trace the origin of her own implanted cardiac defibrillator. The presentation will explore topics like conflict minerals, global forest conservation, and the displacement of indigenous people, helping the audience reckon with the impacts of our resource-oblivious medical system and consider the potential of technology reuse and resource recycling.

Objectives: 

• Describe the social and environmental ethical issues embedded in medical technology supply chains
• Underline the resource-obliviousness of our current medical system
• Identify strategies for reducing resource waste through clinical decisions, the U.S.'s regulatory landscape, and med tech company policies

Katherine E. Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown 2020). Lightning Flowers was a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The book was featured on NPR's Fresh Air and named the Common Read for Colorado College in 2022-2023. Standefer's previous work appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She lives in Wyoming, beside the Greys River.