FINN HELLER
Overview of my Product
During my senior year at Watkinson, I've had the privilege of taking the school's Senior Seminar class. This is a dual component class containing both seminar class-time while also being centered around Senior Projects. Senior Projects allow Watkinson students to choose a topic of interest and expand their knowledge on the subject over the course of the school year. This project has greatly helped to expand my knowledge and academic capabilities, assisting me to further grow as a student and an individual.
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My chosen topic is a great interest of mine: the intersection between research, ethics, and the law. Through my year-long work on this project, I've done a colossal amount of research, formulated many ideas within the topic, and consulted with highly knowledgeable professionals in the field. My research will come to an end in May with my final presentation. The presentation serves as a start-to-finish guide of my learning and work through the year, and finally establish an asnwer to my essential question.
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Sparking Interest
For many years, I've had a great interest in the field of biomedical research. So much so that at a certain point a year ago, I began considering it as a potential career. But at the same time, I still had a serious interest in the field of law. It wasn't until I started my senior project that I realized there was an intersection between these two fields. This then led me toward the topic of the legal landscape within biomedical research, with a minor focus on the ethical aspects.
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Essential Question
In the Senior Project, the essential question is meant to serve as a guiding star throughout the process, helping to keep a central focus throughout the research process. Finalizing my essential question was difficult, as I struggled to factor in the 3 sides of my topic. Eventually, I managed to do this and formulate my essential question:
"How should legal cases in biomedical research be handled?"
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Read my research paper here!
Artist's Statement
In September, I began the process of creating my senior seminar project. It took me a lengthy deal of time to conceive my topic, as I struggled to find a way to merge my interests in law and biomedical research for the project. In the early stages of the process, learning about how these interests connected helped me to develop my essential question: How should legal cases in biomedical research be handled? Over the past months, I've conducted a great deal of research around my question and developed my product to outline an idea for how biomedical research and the law should connect. My product is a research paper, filled with valuable sources, important information obtained through my mentor, and a skilled examination of a past failure in biomedical research.
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Following my two-week mentorship, I began to formulate my product. Initially, my plan was for my research paper to be much longer than it ultimately was. My initial conceptions of it involved three separate sections: firstly looking at the general overview of the main topic, then proceeding to examine the case of Henrietta Lacks as an example of the biomedical research industry's ethical and legal failure which serves as a cautionary tale for future research, and finally analyzing the case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as another example of failure in the biomedical research industry. As I went about writing the paper, I realized that I could greatly improve it by cutting out the section about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, allowing me to divert a greater amount of the paper's focus toward the section on Henrietta Lacks.
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Throughout my research process and the building of my product, I've attempted to use the knowledge I've accumulated to answer my essential question and uncover the significance of this answer in modern society. At the start of my process, I thought this was incredibly simple, but as time went on, I realized how intricate and complicated this matter was as the topics of ethics and law ran so deep and important within the question. All of my project ultimately led me to formulate an answer to my essential question. I want my project to serve as a method of explaining this answer: that legal cases in biomedical research should be handled with a priority on ethical principles and accountability. This most importantly means ensuring informed consent and addressing issues of equity and justice. Vigorous legal infrastructures and regulatory oversight systems are essential to safeguarding te rights and welfare of research participants while promoting scientific advancement for the common good.
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Artist Statment Video
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