Making Bioethics Engaging and Accessible Through Video
The Challenge
Bioethics grapples with big questions: Should doctors be able to assist a dying person’s wish to end their life? How do we decide who should be first in line for scarce resources such as transplant organs or new vaccines? Should we be able to engineer our DNA or the DNA of our children?
The Greenwall Foundation is the premier foundation solely focused on funding bold, cutting-edge bioethics projects with the goal of improving policy and practice. Bioethical questions affect almost all of us over the course of our lives, but outside of the field, bioethics is not well understood.
As The Greenwall Foundation seeks to make bioethics integral to decisions in health care, policy, and research, we work alongside them to make bioethics issues more accessible to public audiences.
Our Approach
We created a concept for a digital video series called Bioethics &, with the goal of introducing audiences to complex bioethics issues in an engaging way. To source narrators and topics for the videos, we looked to the Greenwall Faculty Scholars, a group of researchers who have received funding from the Foundation to carry out innovative bioethics research.
We produced four short videos on different topics: consciousness, prognosis, drug regulation and philosophy. Each video features a different Greenwall Faculty Scholar, recorded remotely, speaking about the topic through engaging hooks, anecdotes and questions for the audience. The videos also use text cards, animation and other visuals to aid the narrative.
Results and Impact
The Greenwall Foundation shared the Bioethics & videos via their email newsletter and Twitter account. On Twitter, the videos generated high engagement and views. Because the issues covered in the videos are evergreen, the Greenwall Foundation will continue to share these videos to help make bioethics issues more accessible to more people. They also plan to add more videos to the series in the future.