 I think one of the things that's going to make our master's degree so exciting is that people will come with different expectations about what they want to learn and we're going to be able to offer a variety of options to people. So if you come with a particular interest in law and health policy or a particular interest in research ethics or neuroethics, we're going to be able to adjust that curriculum and your opportunities and the people you're going to meet to be able to really fit with a variety of different interests in bioethics. I think what makes this program different is, first of all, we have the resources not just of Harvard Medical School but of the entire university and the program will be open to courses across the university plus we're going to be able to put our students into the many Harvard teaching hospitals that are around here, all of which have vibrant ethics programs in and of themselves. I think there's just a richness of resources here that should make it very attractive. What excites me about the master's program is that there's not a day that I go to work where I don't encounter some sort of ethical issue and up until now there just haven't been that many opportunities for people to acquire some competence and expertise and confidence in dealing with these and I think our master's program is going to be able to provide that to lots of people. We have and will always have the ethical issues that arise at the bedside in the way that we interact with our patients and families but in the last ten years or so the field has really exploded beyond the bedside so that now we're looking at very challenging issues in genetics and genomics for example. The explosion in the neurosciences has created a whole new set of ethical issues. Research has become so much more complex. There's the issues of law and public policy so I think the field is now exponentially bigger than it was even just 10 or 15 years ago and that's just not only in the United States but that's internationally as well and I think we're going to hopefully be able to see people from all over the world who are interested in acquiring this knowledge, this expertise. One of the important components of the master's degree is going to be a capstone experience where a student will be able to take a particular question or a small area of interest and explore it in depth, really go down to bedrock and be able to develop a project that really shows an opportunity or really shows how the student can examine something in depth and make a real new and positive contribution. One of the things about bioethics is that it touches so many different parts of the profession whether you're a physician, a nurse, a social worker, an interpreter, you know, a child life specialist. There's ethical aspects of all of these and I think that there are opportunities for people that are in these positions to be able to add this area of interest, expertise to what they do and to be able to contribute to their profession and to their hospital or program that they come from. In terms of the faculty that we have available to us, there's about 50 people in the medical school that are primarily associated with us as our faculty and they're going to be the ones that are going to be doing the bulk of the teaching and mentoring, but as soon as I say that I want to say that there's hundreds and actually it's true thousands of other people within the university that are potentially individuals that our students could interact with who are available, many of whom have a wealth of knowledge and expertise that, you know, depending on the interest of the student could be a perfect fit. My interest in bioethics really grew out of the experiences I had as a young faculty member. I work in a pediatric intensive care unit and as I went bed space to bed space 25 years ago, I was seeing really difficult choices that the families were facing and I was seeing that we really didn't know how to frame those choices for them, many dealing with profound ethical issues at the end of life and about the care of children. And I just saw an unbelievable wealth of opportunity to begin to think about these things more clearly to be able to help our patients and families in ways that we hadn't been able to before. So that's how I got interested in the field. I think what I love about teaching bioethics in particular is that when we teach bioethics, it's not so much just about the content. It's not just giving a set of facts to a student because that's not what the field is really about. It's talking about the issues. It's helping them work through their own ideas, their thoughts, seeing how the logical progression of an idea works and then growing from that and recognizing that, oh, maybe I'm going to modify how I view this based upon the conversation we've just had. That's a remarkable experience for a teacher to have and one that I never tire of. Like many people, I came to Harvard Medical School as a part of my training and I figured that I would finish my training and go back to the West Coast where I came from. But what I found was that there was just so much opportunity here and it's really kept me here for now almost 30 years. And I continue to find that. The richness of the resources, the questions, the places to learn, the different fields that are available here I think is really second to none anywhere in the world.