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Medical advances and issues of medicine and society are raising more ethical questions than ever, and Wake Forest University is responding with a new graduate program.

The school's master's degree in bioethics will begin with the fall 2009 semester. The program began accepting applications this week.

The program will deal with real-world ethical dilemmas, said Mark Hall, co-director of the program and a professor of law and public health.

The medical profession "is continually having to think about and improve the balance between doctors and nurses doing what they think is best for patients versus giving patients more freedom to decide for themselves," he said. "Striking that balance is ... a moving target."

The program will stress two areas: bioethics and biotechnology, and bioethics in social context.

In biotechnology, the program will address such hot-button issues as stem-cell research and cloning, as well as issues lower on the public's radar, Hall said.

Those issues might include whether and how to use genetic testing, particularly when it might not always be reliable, to detect a hereditary tendency toward such maladies as strokes and various types of cancer.

The program also will examine issues relating to access to care and paying for it, Hall said.

The program comes as the country is running short of bioethicists. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in June that many leading bioethicists are nearing retirement age. In the June issue of the journal Academic Medicine, one current and one former official of the National Institutes of Health called on that organization, which advises the government on medical affairs, to train more people in the field.

Wake Forest found no such program in seven southeastern states it surveyed before deciding to launch its own.

The university is not limiting the class to medical professionals. The program aims to equip its students to practice, teach or conduct research into bioethics, which can have ramifications in other areas, such as law and public health-care policy.

The program is not aimed at providing all the answers, Hall said. Rather, it is intended to help students develop a framework within which to make difficult ethical calls.

And it's not just academics who must make these calls, he said. Doctors, nurses and medical technicians on the front line of patient care must as well.

"Before, we tended to turn to sort of anointed bioethicists to provide guidance," Hall said. "But experience shows us that expertise and ability have to be disseminated through the ranks of health-care delivery."

Contact Lex Alexander at 373-7088 or lex.alexander@news-record.com