- User Guide
- I Would’ve Let You Die Too Lesson Plan
- The Girl Who Died Twice Lesson Plan
- Need a New Liver? Drinkers to the Back of the Line Lesson Plan
- Why Can’t I Buy a Kidney? Lesson Plan
- A Womb of One’s Own? Lesson Plan
- Creating One Life to Save Another Lesson Plan
- An Off Switch for Depression? Lesson Plan
- Miracle Drugs, Million Dollar Price Tags Lesson Plan
- The Future of Babymaking
- The God Squad Lesson Plan
- Lesson Plan Advisory Board
Sign up for project updates, including the release of educational materials for each episode of the playing god? podcast.
The Berman Institute is partnering with a group of nationally recognized K-12 educators from across the country to bring bioethics into science classes everywhere.
Drawing upon the Institute-produced podcast playing god? for its source material, this collaboration has produced free lesson plans and related educational materials for teachers who wish to introduce their students to complex ethical questions generated by the development and use of new scientific and medical innovations. Each episode serves as a unique case study that explores bioethics principles and will inspire lively discussions.

Episodes and Lesson Plans
Listen to the Season Two trailer
About playing god?
Life-and-death dilemmas. New medical technologies. Controversial treatments. In playing god? we hear from the patients whose lives were transformed—and sometimes saved—by medical innovations and the bioethicists who help guide complex decisions.
Ventilators can keep critically ill people alive, but when is it acceptable to turn the machines off? Organ transplants save lives but when demand outpaces supply how do we decide who gets them? Increasingly, novel reproductive technologies can help people have babies in ways that are far beyond what nature allows. So, when should such “Brave New World” technologies be introduced and who should control them?
playing god? is a podcast created by the Berman Institute of Bioethics. hosted by Lauren Arora Hutchinson, Director of the Berman’s Institute’s Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab; executive producers are Anna Mastroianni and Jeffrey Kahn, working closely with Amelia Hood.
Episodes of Season One of playing god?, made possible by generous support from The Greenwall Foundation, premiered each Tuesday from October 20 through December 12, 2023. Season Two will debut in early 2025.