Kathy was kind. She was smart, and she was tough.
But what I will remember, first, is that she was kind.
She was in charge of the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill during my postdoc, and while I think I spoke to her on the phone before moving to Montréal, I hadn’t met her before then. I was going to fly up to Montréal to look for an apartment, but she’d assured me that I could find a place upon arrival.
In all my years of knowing her, that might have been the only time she gave me bad advice. (Well, that and suggesting that if I liked Montréal, I’d probably like Boston, too.)
In every other way, however, Kathy was as fine a guide into bioethics and Québec as I could have hoped for. She and her husband Leon invited me over for dinner more times than I could count—in fact, I stayed with them a good chunk of the time I was looking for an apartment—and took me hiking outside of the city, and to various festivals within it.
She also tried to convince me that Montréal bagels were as good as New York bagels, but that didn’t take. (Montréal bagels are fine—and, honestly, given how pillowy so many NY bagels have become of late, certainly the better size—but a bit too sweet for my taste.)
Mostly, though, I remember the many long conversations with her in her office, first in the old building on Peel, then in her corner office in the building on the other side of the street. I’d have been in my office at the end of the day and have wandered over to hers to say goodbye, then end up staying for an hour or two as we talked about ethics and genetics and politics and music and memory.
She was generous with her time and with herself.
Again, she was kind as she worked her way through her and my thoughts, but it was through these long conversations, as well as in our various BMU meetings, seminar, and colloquia, that her tough-mindedness revealed itself. It was so easy to skip past the basics, but Kathy always returned to them, and to the basic necessity of patient and subject protection.
That was Kathy’s abiding concern: how to take care of people, be they patients at the Children’s Hospital, where she served as a clinical ethicist, or when writing about subjects in clinical trials. She and her colleagues (including Stan Shapiro and Charles Weijer) returned again and again to the necessity of clinical equipoise in research trials, especially in regards to trials of psychoactive medications.
All too often psychiatric patients would be—are—offered fewer subjects-protections than other similarly seriously ill patient-subjects: instead of testing new treatments against current ones, researchers test the investigational drug against. . . nothing. Not only will this skew the results by inflating the effects of the drug—which is bad enough—but subjects who might otherwise benefit from current treatments are denied them, and thus, suffer as a direct and entirely predictable result of their participation in the trial.
This, as Kathy would note, is a textbook definition of unethical research.
She and Stan focused on psychiatric patients, but Kathy’s research ranged widely across bioethics and included considerations of genetic and stem cell research. She worked with Bartha Knoppers at the Université de Montréal and Françoise Baylis at Dalhousie in trying to come to grips with the then-novel human embryonic stem cell research.
Bartha and Françoise can be aggressive in argumentation—I am like them in that respect—but Kathy was not one to be flattened by fast-rolling words. She was too acute a thinker.
This is what I missed, at first. Her kindness, her gentleness, was so immediately apparent, that I made the mistake I too often made: that a softness means weakness.
She was soft; she was also sharp. There was no contradiction.
That is a lesson I’m still learning.
I am so sorry that I will never be able to tell her how much she meant to me, personally and intellectually. I am a better thinker for having known her, and a better teacher for having taught alongside her. She is, and will remain, a touchstone. I will miss her for the rest of my life.
She died at home, among her family, April 12. Rest in peace, Kathy.
Thanks to Jonathan Kimmelman for tracking me down and notifying me of Kathy’s death.
AbsurdBeats 