Who We Are

The Institute of Human Values in Health Care (the Institute) was created in 1994 as an interdisciplinary program dedicated to scholarly inquiry at the intersection of bioethics with health policy. In 1999, the Institute assumed management of the Thomas A Pitts Memorial Lectureship in Medical Ethics, a major conference held at MUSC annually. The proceedings of each conference are published as symposium issues of peer-review journals. Recent lectureships have covered a broad spectrum of topics in bioethics.

This primary focus continued until 2009, when, consequent to a Clinical and Translational Science Award grant from the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources, the Institute added a new focus on research ethics after it assumed a central role in the Core Clinical Research Ethics (CRE) program of MUSC’s South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research Institute (SCTR). The Director of the Institute, Robert M. Sade, MD, serves as the Director of SCTR’s CRE program.

The interdisciplinary membership of the Institute is drawn from the medical, humanities, and social sciences faculties of the Medical University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston, the University of South Carolina, Clemson University, and the Charleston School of Law. The work of the Institute is augmented by contributions from other scholars in South Carolina. Over the past five years, members of the Institute have published 44 papers on topics in bioethics and health policy, have given 63 lectures and seminars nationally and regionally, and have given 70 lectures and seminars for various departments and programs within MUSC.