Vina Vaswani, MD: Integrating ethics into technology from the start

Vina Vaswani, MD: Integrating ethics into technology from the start

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On December 3, 1984, more than 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. The plume immediately killed at least 3,800 people and a total of 10,000 people died over the first few days, according to a 2005 paper published in Environmental Health. Up to 20,000 premature deaths occurred in the subsequent two decades.

“At that time I was in year two of my medical degree,” says Vina Vaswani, MD, a forensic medicine specialist at Yenepoya University. Two people showed up at the medical college hospital, nearly 350 kilometers from Bhopal. After boarding a train, they’d lost consciousness, so strangers brought them to the hospital. Years later, Vaswani was traveling with victims of this tragedy who received treatment as participants in a clinical trial. “When I asked, ‘Do you know this is part of research?’ They said, ‘No.’”

This was typical of Indian research at that time, she says. “Doctors who were conducting research would say, ‘If it works out, it will be for their benefit, so you don't have to tell patients it’s research.’” Also at that time, forensic professionals taught ethics because they were part of the jurisprudence system. A forensic doctor herself, Vaswani taught the code of ethics, which essentially meant training doctors to avoid negligence charges. “I said, surely this can't be ethics, because who is at the center of activity? A doctor, not the patient.”

Wanting to learn more, Vaswani looked to Europe. She came across the Erasmus Mundus program, an EU initiative to foster international collaboration, which offered a year-long ethics program at three European universities. A few years after Vaswani completed the program, her medical college became a full university (Yenepoya) and established the Centre for Ethics. The flagship program was the Post Graduate Diploma in Bioethics and Medical Ethics, which was the first In India bioethics diploma program. (The Centre for Ethics, 15 years old now, has more than 350 alumni.) Along with performing autopsies, she began to teach bioethics.