The Intensive Bioethics Course (IBC) is a weeklong, immersive introduction to bioethics that has brought professionals from around the world to Georgetown’s flowering summer campus for the last four decades.

For forty years, the IBC has been treasured as “a time apart” for deep reflection on issues we can’t always give the sustained attention they require in the frenetic pace of daily life. Each year, a diverse cohort of doctors, nurses, dentists, policy-makers, hospital chaplains, lawyers, IRB panelists, and others come together to grapple with some of the most profound moral issues they confront in their work, guided by internationally-renowned bioethics scholars from the KIE and beyond.

This year, participants from China, Sweden, Portugal, Norway, Italy, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere visited Georgetown to learn from KIE scholars and guests such as James Childress, Dave Wendler, and John Gluck.

The IBC involves a mix of plenary sessions, small group discussions, and optional activities such as a bioethics film screening, individual research consolations in Georgetown’s Bioethics Research Library, and (this year!) 40th birthday cake cutting ceremony.

This year also rang in the inaugural Edmund Pellegrino Memorial Lecture.

Dr. Pellegrino was a shining star of the Georgetown campus, and proudly contributed to the IBC every year. Last year was his last; and this year, Dan Sulmasy (renowned bioethicist and a student of Ed’s) gave the first of the Memorial Lectures, appropriately (given Ed’s scholarly contributions) on virtue in bioethics. “I am a better physician, a better ethicist, and a better man because of Ed Pellegrino,” Dr. Sulmasy said in his opening remarks.

For more on the IBC:
· IBC40 website
· IBC40 storified (our social media coverage of the week, including photos)

Other resources:
· on Dr. Pellegrino
· the BRL welcomes IBC40 participants