biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1950– )
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| biography:
| Philosopher and biomedical ethicist, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. After taking his BA at Brandeis (1971), he took an MA, MPhil, and PhD (1979) at Columbia University, where he served on the faculty of the university's medical school, school of public health, and journalism school. He also taught at the University of Pittsburgh (1986), and then joined the Hastings Center (Briarcliff Manor, New York) as associate for humanities (1977–84), becoming associate director (1985–7). Appointed director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota, where he was also a professor of philosophy (1987–94), he went on to become director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania (1994). He has edited or written some 18 books and more than 300 articles on topics in biomedical ethics, health policy, and the history and philosophy of health care. Among his best known titles are When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust (1992) and If I Were a Rich Man Could I Buy a Pancreas (1992). A consultant to many organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the Clinton Health Policy Task Force Ethics Working Group (1993), his primary areas of research were in the use of new technologies in health care, transplantation, resource allocation, the termination of treatment, genetics, human experimentation, and long-term care. He wrote a syndicated column on bioethics, carried in some 40 newspapers in the USA and abroad, and is a frequent guest and much-quoted spokesperson in the national media whenever issues of bioethics come to the fore. |
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