Caroline Bass spent eight weeks at a bioethics institute at Yale University with support from the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence. Photo by Mike Sands.

Caroline Bass’s interests span multiple disciplines: science and medicine, social sciences, law and philosophy. That’s one reason she is attracted to bioethics—a field that encompasses them all.

This year, Bass, a political science and philosophy major, entered the field in a way that isn’t usually open to college sophomores. She was the youngest full-time participant at a summer institute organized by Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. Support for her eight-week residency was provided by the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence.

“Caroline has a sharp, analytical mind that helps her see through to the key issues in complex ethical or policy problems,” says Shannon French, Inamori Center director and associate professor of philosophy. French teaches a course on global corporate ethics that Bass took last spring.

“She’s a creative and original thinker,” French adds. “She has strong intellectual curiosity, which pushes her to keep asking questions and explore topics fully, even across different fields and disciplines.”

Bass learned about the Yale institute in fall 2012, while she was taking her first bioethics course. She applied even though the odds were against her; if she didn’t succeed, she planned to try again in her junior or senior year. But with help from the university’s Career Center, she wrote a compelling application and was accepted.

Once she arrived at the institute, Bass found that most of her colleagues “had at least two degrees or titles after their names.” Her relative inexperience weighed on her a bit as she considered topics for a research project. Still, she started compiling ideas and emailing them to French.

Then she read a New York Times profile of an addiction medicine specialist with his own reality television show. Bass knew all about reality TV; in fact, she was a regular viewer, even though the shows sometimes made her uneasy. “It’s always in the back of your mind that you’re engaged in this voyeuristic act,” she explains. It occurred to her that medical reality shows would be an excellent subject for ethical analysis.

“This was something I could be an expert on,” she explains. “It was accessible to me. And Dr. French told me to go with this one, because it was the topic that appealed to me the most.”

In her institute paper, Bass places medical reality television in historical context, noting that the relationship between medicine and entertainment goes back to circus sideshows. Like the sideshows, she argues, medical reality TV exploits and dehumanizes its subjects.

Bass acknowledges that patients who appear on these shows have waived their right to medical privacy. Nonetheless, she says, physicians have an ethical obligation “to uphold the codes of confidentiality, even when the patient wants to waive them.”  She is especially troubled by instances in which participants are thwarted when they try to reassert their privacy rights.

“Off camera, privacy in the doctor-patient relationship works to protect the patient in his most vulnerable state,” Bass writes. “Medical reality television hones its craft by broadcasting these vulnerable and uncensored moments.”

The harm caused by the shows, however, extends beyond the patient participants. Bass argues that the spectacle of physicians violating ethical norms undermines public trust in the health care system. By broadcasting therapeutic relationships, reality TV raises doubts about the medical profession’s commitment to confidentiality.

Bass continued researching her topic during an independent study with French this fall. When she submitted a paper to a leading bioethics journal, the editors invited her to write a shorter version for possible publication.

“This was my first endeavor in undergraduate research, and it has broadened my understanding of what bioethics is,” Bass says. “Because bioethics touches almost every discipline in academia, I ended up delving into journalism, entertainment, law, advertising and marketing, even pop psychology.” In the process, she was constantly reminded that “the practice of medicine does not operate in a vacuum.”