The Voice of Bioethics at Berkeley

This profile of Guy Micco is really touching and gives a sense of what bioethics is like in the San Francisco bay area. Micco is a recently retired internist who for some time chaired the ethics committee at Alta Bates. Today he teaches students in the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program, who take basic science and electives at Berkeley and get clinical practice at UCSF. He heads the UC-B School of Public Health’s Center on Aging and its Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law (CMHL). One anecdote from the profile:

A former patient of Micco, Laqueur tells the story of the renowned ethicist Bernard Williams, who often went head to head with Micco, during the years he taught at Berkeley, over philosophical questions. “I can’t bear Micco and all his nonsense!” Williams was known to say of Micco’s belief in the capacity of the arts and humanities to “humanize.” But then Williams got sick, and none of the doctors at Oxford University, where he was then teaching, could diagnose his ailment. He asked to be seen by Micco — “who figured it out in 30 minutes,” Laqueur says. “He’s a brilliant diagnostician.”

And what is he like in his role?

Laqueur views him as an “unsung hero of campus” — a faculty member whose contributions don’t lie in the realm of publication, scholarship, or administrative acumen, but who nonetheless has made an “enormous impact on students and the ethical environment. In another age he would have been a religious leader or one of these doctors who would have had a cultish following.”

In this age, however, in Micco’s more modest estimation, he’s one man doing his bit in the interval between birth and death. “Every so often, when medicine gets too biomedical, too heavy into the technological,” he says, “someone calls for a corrective: ‘we need to turn back to the human element, the doctor-patient relationship.’ That’s happening now around the country, and the humanities play a key role…. I feel I’m a small part of that movement.”