How does bioethics enter the picture?
If you only have a certain amount of money in a healthcare system, how do you make sure to take care of the most expensive but also the most vulnerable populations – the elderly and the disabled? They’re generally the most expensive populations [to take care of], but we also have the greatest duty to protect them.
In your application essay, you wrote about your grandfather who escaped the Nazis by traveling with the Mir Yeshiva to Shanghai with the help of a visa issued to him illegally by Japanese official Chiune Sugihara. What inspired you to write about him?
The essay prompt was to talk about why I’m applying for the scholarship and what I want to do with it, so I wrote a lot about bioethics and taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves and who are generally marginalized. I wrote that a large motivation for me is my grandfather’s influence because he was saved from the Holocaust by Sugihara who acted extremely selflessly. So that idea – that we have to protect people who can’t protect themselves – is something that my grandfather represented, advocated for, and imbued in us.
Did you know your grandfather?
He was alive when I was a child, but he had a stroke so he wasn’t so communicative. But because there are so many stories that I hear about him from other family members and friends, I feel like I know him well.