From human cloning to rape as a war crime, West Virginia University’s College of Law takes its cue from the daily news on Monday, April 4, to present two lectures that delve into the dilemmas that shape life in the 21 st century.
At 11 a.m., nationally-known theologian Thomas Shannon will discuss”Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy: Scientific, Ethical and Public Policy Issues,”in the Lugar Courtroom.
Shannon is delivering this year’s John W. Fisher II Lecture in Law and Medicine.
A professor of religion and social ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Shannon has spent his career researching and observing the moral and political dilemmas wrought by modern medicineparticularly stem cell research and human cloning.
Shannon worries that researchers may be moving too fast in the lab to consider the long-term implications in life.
“It takes a long time to think this stuff through and we don’t have that luxury anymore,”said Shannon, who researched the relationship between religious issues and genetics as part of the Human Genome project.”By the time you think about a new development, five more come along.”
At 5:30 p.m., for the law school’s McDougall Lecture in International Law, a WVU graduate who is now a human rights professor and advocate in Canada will discuss rape as a war crime.
Megan Carpenter’s lecture,”Bare Justice: What does justice mean for the victims of sexual violence in the aftermath of war?”will be in Room 158 of the law school.
A 1999 WVU College of Law graduate, Carpenter is based in Atlantic Canada, as a professor of human rights at St. Thomas University and doctoral chair in human rights and citizenship at the Atlantic Human Rights Centre.
While the international legal community slowly began acknowledging rape as a war crime in the 1990s after conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, it still remains a brutal byproduct of armed conflict, she said.
“If women are raped, their husbands, fathers and brothers are emasculated and the whole community is broken,”she said.”Sexual violence is used against women to destroy community pride.”
For more information about the lectures, contact Margaret Obuch, WVU College of Law, at 304-293-8278.