“Looking Back”
Farhat Moazam

I embarked on the journey alone but
One by one they came, we became a caravan

Serendipity can lead to the most rewarding ventures in life. In 2002, as a doctoral student in the University of Virginia, I chose to conduct an ethnographic study on organ transplantation in Pakistan in the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), a public sector healthcare institution in Karachi. Late at night as I sat analyzing my data, Dr. Adib Rizvi, Director of SIUT, would walk in, pull up a chair and we, both surgeons, would compare notes about our day – he his experiences in the OR and clinics and I the moral quandaries I had discovered interviewing patients, families, and physicians. One day, Dr. Rizvi looked at me and said, “Come back to Pakistan. We need a center for what you are studying.”

From that comment germinated the Center of Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC). Inaugurated in SIUT on October 8, 2004, its beginnings were modest – one full-time and one part-time faculty (myself and Aamir Jafarey) and one staff member housed in a narrow L-shaped room with two poky offices – but the goals expansive. The Center would serve as the academic and intellectual resource in bioethics for Pakistan and the region and establish a presence in the international community. Including the word “Culture” in the Center’s name was deliberate. It flagged the emphasis in our educational and research activities on engaging with local cultural values, including religion, and socioeconomic realities that shape personal and professional moral lives. This would serve as a corrective to the philosophical, analytic paradigm dominating modern bioethics.

Today, twenty years later, CBEC has four full-time faculty and over a dozen national and international associate faculty from fields that constitute the core of interdisciplinary bioethics. Over a hundred graduates from the Center’s formal bioethics programs, Master’s and a Postgraduate Diploma, and many more professionals who have attended CBEC workshops, are now in institutions around Pakistan and the region. In 2017, CBEC was designated a WHO Collaborating Center in Bioethics, and began the CBEC KEMRI Bioethics Training Initiative (CK-BTI) program though an NIH grant.

The June 2024 Bioethics Links in your hands today, or on your screen, is a special edition to commemorate CBEC’s two decades of existence. For us, working on this newsletter was a time of self-reflection about who we are. Assembling the content involved ferreting out (scattered) old reports, correspondences and photographs. Heeding poet Robert Burns “to see ourselves as others see us,” we also requested teachers and graduates to share their impressions. A special thanks to faculty Sualeha Shekhani and Farid bin Masood and staff Aamir Shehzad in helping to make this edition possible.

*Professor and Chairperson, Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture, SIUT