The Ethics of Precision Medicine and Burned Agency with Paul Scherz and Travis Pickell

In 2022, the now-bankrupt company 23andMe was telling customers their genetic risks for cancers and Alzheimer’s. For Paul Scherz, a former genetics researcher turned moral theologian, this was a symptom of something much larger: medicine had quietly shifted its central purpose from curing disease to managing risk. Around the same time, Travis Pickell was diagnosed with testicular cancer during his first week of a PhD program, an experience that cracked open the hospital as a moral space and led him to ask why we have so many choices about how and when we die, yet so little cultural guidance for making them. Together, their books—The Ethics of Precision Medicine and Burdened Agency—diagnose two sides of the same problem: the weight of responsibility that modern medicine places on individuals, and the loss of the traditions, practices, and virtues that once helped people bear it.

The Medicalization of Risk and the Rise of Burdened Agency