Stanford team takes home first prize at National Bioethics Bowl

Five Stanford undergraduates took first place in the National Bioethics Bowl on April 11, following a nail-biting finish. 

After a marathon day of debates, the team’s final round ended in a tie. To decide the winner, the judges tallied scores from all previous rounds. Stanford had won by a single point.

The National Bioethics Bowl, hosted at the University of Pittsburgh this year, is an annual tournament where undergraduate students debate ethical issues in medicine, biotechnology and healthcare. Competitors represented 20 schools from around the country, including Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Tulane, Rice, Georgetown and more.

“I honestly am still like, wow,” said Alice Finkelstein ’27, who competed in her first nationals as part of the winning team. “It really goes to show how close these teams are skill-wise, and how hard it is to say who makes a better case than the others.”

The Stanford group is part of the Bioethics Fellowship, a year-long program that began just three years ago under the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. According to Program Director and Coach Collin Anthony Chen, the team placed first in its inaugural year, third the following year, and now first again.

Consisting of Finkelstein, Rhea Jain ’27, Rhea Rastogi ’28, Catherine Wu ’28 and Mirabai Herz ’27, the Stanford team went undefeated across the four preliminary rounds, earning the highest scores before advancing to the championship final against the host.

Unlike a traditional debate competition, teams are not assigned opposing sides. Instead, each round consists of two cases, one for each team to defend a position they find most reasonable. Judges then score on their presentation clarity and ability to critique opponents rather than declaring a winner of the argument. 

“The way in which teams can compete with one another is more like, ‘I invite you to talk more about this’ as opposed to ‘I must fight you on this point,'” Chen explained.

For the students, this collaborative spirit is part of what drew them in. 

Rhea Jain ’27 said the Ethics Bowl format felt different, as it was less so about trying to be right and more so about constructive dialogue about important issues.

Rastogi echoed that sentiment. “Our general strategy is to start with our moral instincts, work through our disagreements as a team (which can get a bit heated) and then look for ethical theories or bioethics principles to back up our position,” Rastogi wrote to The Daily.

To prepare, the team discusses a series of 14 to 15 case studies inspired by real events, with this year’s lineup including questions about the role of artificial intelligence in medicine, the ethics of using antidepressants to suppress libido and whether EMTs should wear body cameras.

Each member served as “lead” on three or four cases, who was responsible for drafting a 10-minute presentation that identified the core issue, laid out relevant ethical frameworks and countered any possible objections.

Practices involved splitting the group in half, with some presenting, and the rest providing objections. Having a team retreat the weekend before nationals also helped bring everything together for a final push, according to Jain.

While watching the team debate these dilemmas, Chen felt optimistic about the broader implications of discussing bioethics.

“These are the kinds of problems that are pulling at the seams of the country’s cohesion,” Chen said. “If undergraduates are able to work together for hours to respectfully engage with a multitude of different viewpoints… that leaves me feeling good about our capacity to seriously engage with the hardest questions facing our society today.”

The team’s hard work paid off in the final round, where the team had to argue a case about pre-implantation genetic testing: if technology allowed parents to choose embryos based on social and behavioral traits, should they be permitted to do so? 

“Our answer was basically no, unless the conditions that the child has at birth are serious medical conditions,” Jain said. “That’s the only instance in which they should be allowed to select certain embryos.”

She also cited the team’s coordination as the reason for their success. “During the competition, when we would face off against other teams, we were able to almost read each other’s minds, which was the most compelling part,” said Jain.

With the competition season now over, the bioethics fellowship now shifts to a series of faculty and practitioner visits.

Students noted how the fellowship changed how they approached moral dilemmas in general. Jain, who is pre-law, noted how the cases she studied have already started shaping how she sees the world.

“As technologies advance, it’s so important to study these ethical issues and talk about them,” she said. “Having an ability to critically think about the ethical implications on many different fronts is incredibly important.”

The post Stanford team takes home first prize at National Bioethics Bowl appeared first on The Stanford Daily.