Search Results

Good mentors recognize that fostering research integrity and modeling the responsible conduct of research in all their mentoring activities is essential to guiding protégés in what is expected for the ethical practice of research. This chapter describes various roles of the mentor and mentee, and drawing on the literature about research mentoring, presents strategies and practices that appear to enhance the mentoring relationship. Information about cross-race and cross-gender mentoring is presented. Guidelines for selecting a mentor, as well as a tool for mentors and protégés to assess how effectively they are carrying out their roles are also included.

This chapter contextualizes the 1943 paper by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts on the logic of neural activity through McCulloch’s emerging institutional roles at the University of Illinois at Chicago—both in psychiatry research and as an egalitarian mentor. His performance of this identity at a crucial stage in his career facilitated his turn to the more clinical aspects of brain organization as well as his model-building practices, which converged in his rhetoric of providing a foundational basis for the ever-expanding discipline of psychiatry. The chapter discusses the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and of Nicolas Rashevsky’s group in mathematical biophysics at the University of Chicago as key institutional contexts for McCulloch’s work with Pitts. Rather than simply a precursor to later work in artificial intelligence, their work signified a burgeoning practice of applying mathematics and logic to problems in the biomedical sciences, as well as continued fluidity between science, medicine, and philosophy.

Chapter four explores how educators might help cultivate the capacity for authentic patient care among doctors-in-training, including a comportment of humility, openness, and gratitude for patients. The argument is made that the curative ethos of medicine and its preoccupation with calculative thinking will persist until educators can cultivate within clinicians and clinicians-in-training the capacity to face their vulnerability and the reality of existential anxiety. It is through a pedagogy that values and fosters vulnerability and reflexivity that this capacity can be cultivated. Although recent trends in the professionalism movement, including that of “professional identity formation,” have made progress toward these ends, these movements actually may serve to reinforce calculative thinking, due to their focus on outcomes and assessment. This chapter looks critically at such trends in medical education and contends that ideas concerning professionalism can be enriched and expanded through an understanding of virtue ethics and the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, which emphasize personal development, experiential and habitual learning, and quality mentorship.