Teaching Health Law: Teaching Law Students to Be Policymakers: The Health and Science Policy Workshop on Genomic Research

Abstract

There comes a time, often towards the end of college, when young adults start thinking about their career paths. Science and medicine are popular areas of interest, but the reality of blood and cadavers, or pipettes and centrifuges, has a tendency to discourage some potential doctors or scientists from pursuing these options. There has thus emerged a trend of using law school as a vehicle for engaging in a health- or science-related field. However, this legal career path is not as well traveled as the more common law firm route. Many students interested in combining law and health or science express an interest in “doing health policy,” yet often have little understanding about what that entails and how to best develop the analytic skills needed to succeed in a policy environment. This should not be surprising, given the disagreement about how to define policy and how best to teach students to do policy analysis. Nevertheless, law schools have a responsibility to prepare these students for a variety of legal roles (e.g., drafting and implementing legislation and regulations, advocating on behalf of clients, working with industry, etc.) by finding creative ways to expose them to the complex (and often messy) world of policymaking. They also have a responsibility to do so in a structured and mentored environment that emphasizes learning and skill development. Classroom education, and its emphasis on legal theory, is insufficient to prepare law students with an interest in health and science policy for future careers in this field. In response to this pedagogical challenge, we designed our “Health and Science Policy Workshop: The Regulation of Genomic Research.” This innovative educational experience allowed law students to engage with actual policymaking. The course was not designed as a mere academic exercise. Rather, it grew out of our recognition that the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) was being asked to provide ethical and regulatory guidance to scientists, ethics review boards, and research institutions, all of which were struggling with the appropriate way to incorporate next-generation genomic sequencing technology into research protocols. We were in a unique position to design a policy workshop on this topic because both of us straddle the legal academic and health policy spheres. At numerous points throughout her academic career, Professor Rothenberg has been involved as an active participant in policymaking at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including taking time off from teaching to spend sabbaticals at NHGRI and the National Institute for Child and Human Development (NICHD). As part of Professor Berkman’s joint appointment between NHGRI and the NIH Department of Bioethics, he has extensive protected research time to produce independent academic and policy papers, which inform (and are informed by) his institutional research ethics and science policy service requirement. He also has years of experience teaching law school courses. With these backgrounds, we were able to forge a unique collaboration between the Law and Health Care Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law (“UM Carey Law”) and the NIH. This workshop gave students practical exposure to cutting-edge regulatory and science policy questions currently facing NIH. Under our supervision, students worked with bioethicists, policymakers, and scientists from NHGRI and the NIH Department of Bioethics to analyze an emerging set of legal, ethical, and regulatory questions related to the evolving field of genomic science. In this article, we will begin by briefly framing the scientific and ethical issues that served as the foundation for the issues explored in the course. In the subsequent section, we will describe the novel way in which the workshop was designed and structured to achieve a defined set of pedagogic goals. The final section will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of this model, with an emphasis on the challenges and opportunities of generalizing our teaching method to a wide range of academic settings.