Giancarlo Boucugnani studies science and medicine, with an ethical focus

By Lissa Harris

Giancarlo Boucugnani came to Cornell on the road to becoming a doctor. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather and his aunt, both practicing physicians, seemed the right thing to do.

Senior Giancarlo Boucugnani in Uris Library's Andrew Dickson White Library. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

A course in medical sociology changed all of that. A glimpse of the complex ethical and social dimensions of science and medicine sparked a passion that would lead Boucugnani down a very different path.

"It provided me a new lens for looking at the medical profession," said Boucugnani.

In his sophomore year, he opted to leave the premed track and study bioethics -- to the shock of family back home in Miami and in the close-knit Cuban-American community where he grew up in Hialeah, Fla.

"I come from a society where the doctor and the medical profession is highly revered," he said. "The ideas that we are taught here -- that it's the patient's right to question the doctor, to learn on his own, to get a second opinion -- is looked down upon where I come from."

At first, Boucugnani's family was dismayed by his growing propensity for asking tough questions about medical research and practice. Gradually, however, they began to understand his fascination with the subject. By the time Boucugnani had embarked on an honors thesis on federal, state and institutional regulations for human subjects involved in research programs, his father was regularly sending him newspaper clippings about bioethics from The Miami Herald.

Boucugnani's studies have coincided with an explosion of interest in bioethics. The subject became national news, for example, following the deaths of medical research subjects at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania. The deaths prompted research universities -- including Cornell -- to take a hard look at their practices for ensuring that federal ethical standards for research are met.

It has been an exciting time to be involved in the field, said Boucugnani. "Bioethics has become more than just a philosophical and academic field, it's become a profession."

He would like to see ethics become a more integral part of research and education at Cornell. In this, he is not alone. The University Committee on Human Subjects, which reviews research proposals to ensure they meet ethical standards, has embarked on a campuswide effort to better educate the Cornell community on ethics and the research-approval process.

However, Boucugnani said, this is only a small step toward ensuring that Cornell students and scientists are equipped to handle the ethical dimensions of their research. "The question is, why don't we have a bigger ethics curriculum at Cornell?" he asked. "You have to take language, you have to take breadth and depth requirements. Why not have a mandatory ethics course?"

Next year, Boucugnani will enter law school, and in the future he expects to study for a certificate in bioethics. Experience with the law, he hopes, will be valuable in a discipline concerned with the intersections between research and regulation. "Maybe I'll become the director of some big bioethics center. Or maybe I'll become the first academic in my family," he said.

Either way, he'll be breaking new ground.