Thanks to all who helped make this year’s IBC another resounding success!
Sign up below to be notified when information becomes available about IBC48 in 2027. We look forward to welcoming you to our historic campus.
This world-famous course offers stimulating plenary lectures by eminent scholars and clinicians, followed by in-depth small-group discussions led by expert facilitators.
The IBC is a collaborative venture between the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE) and the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics (PCCB), reflecting the course’s integration of biomedical and clinical bioethics. The IBC attracts a large and diverse audience and generates glowing feedback from participants.
In 2026, IBC47 retained its ever-popular small-group discussion sessions that explore the issues raised by the plenary talks, but introduced a new case-based format. Plenary topical presentations were connected to specific discussion cases that illuminated and illustrated ethical issues in realistic and complex ways. The topics and cases elaborated on components of ethical deciding and how to integrate these elements to reach wise decisions in health care, particularly in new, complicated, uncertain, and critical situations. Our focus consistently highlighted the fundamental role of care relationships in making decisions and the reciprocal link between clinical decisions and public health policies.
Plenary assemblies following each case small group considered group insights and questions and continued collegial discussion with faculty panels deeply involved in the case and topic. Also new this year were a keynote on public policy by Dr. Christine Grady, a panel discussion on AI & Health Care, and the opportunity to participate in several Special Topics sessions developed around registrant interest (see below). The popular Bioethics at the Movies Night also continued, this year featuring the moving documentary In the Night I Remember Your Name. This intimate documentary is the story of Pastor Joyce Speegle and her struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease, captured by her daughter Vicki Speegle, the writer, producer, and editor of the program, who joined us to discuss her film. Selections from the PBS documentary Caregiving were also shown.
Special Topics included: Disability Bioethics ● The Moral Strength of Health Care Professionals ● Advancing the ‘Common Good’ in Faith-Based Health Care: Tensions in Culture and Law ● Financialization’s Threat to Medicine ● Pellegrino’s Internal Morality of Medicine ● An Approach to Clinical-Ethics Consultations and Levels of Interventions ● The Missing Patients: Caring for and Coaching Caregivers ● Ethical Questions Regarding Novel Organ-Procurement Techniques (TA-NRP) ● When Good Care Is Refused: Navigating Ethical Tensions and Risk of Harm
Professor Alyssa Newman at IBC46
We look forward to welcoming you to the historic campus of Georgetown University in the nation’s capital as we pursue, in a congenial and conversational environment, our commitment to top-quality professional education in bioethics.
For additional information, please contact us at intensivebioethicscourse@georgetown.edu