Hi All,
I found email addresses for the authors and invited them to visit and/or participate in this thought-provoking thread topic. If you have yet to add your two cents, there's no time like the present.
If you would like to be impressed, as I was, by the authors' professional backgrounds, check out:
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD
Ezekiel J. Emanuel is Head of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and a breast oncologist. He is on extended detail as a special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
After completing Amherst College, he received his M.Sc. from Oxford University in Biochemistry. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University. His dissertation received the Toppan Award for the finest political science dissertation of the year. In 1987-88, he was a fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and his oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Emanuel was an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School before joining the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Emanuel developed The Medical Directive, a comprehensive living will that has been endorsed by
Consumer Reports on Health,
Harvard Health Letter, the
New York Times, the
Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He has published widely on the ethics of clinical research, health care reform, international research ethics, end of life care issues, euthanasia, the ethics of managed care, and the physician-patient relationship in the
New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, and many other medical journals. His book on medical ethics,
The Ends of Human Life, has been widely praised and received honorable mention for the Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He has also published
No Margin, No Mission: Health-Care Organizations and the Quest for Ethical Excellence and co-edited
Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research: Readings and Commentary. Dr. Emanuel has written extensively for the popular press, with articles and op-eds appearing in
The Atlantic, The New Republic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
Dr. Emanuel has received numerous awards including election to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Science and the Association of American Physicians.
Hippocrates Magazine selected him as Doctor of the Year in Ethics. He received the AMA-Burroughs Welcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the John Mendelsohn Award from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and a Fulbright Scholarship (which he declined).
Dr. Emanuel served on President Clinton's Health Care Task Force, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), and on the bioethics panel of the Pan-American Healthcare Organization. Dr. Emanuel has been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, UCLA, the Brin Professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the Kovitz Professor at Stanford Medical School.
Curriculum Vitae
Alan Wertheimer, PhD
http://www.bioethics.nih.gov/people/cv/wertheimer.pdf
G. Owen Schaefer
http://www.bioethics.nih.gov/people/cv/owen%20cv.pdf
History
The
NIH Clinical Center is the world's largest research hospital and has been the site of NIH clinical research for over 50 years. A bioethicist first served the needs of the NIH research community in 1977. However, when John Gallin became director of the Clinical Center in 1995, bioethics became a major initiative. This single ethics position became a full-fledged program, with the goal of creating a premier center for bioethics that would complement and inform the NIH's cutting-edge program of biomedical research. In this stimulating environment of scientific discovery and burgeoning new technologies, the Department of Bioethics has flourished, wrestling with major policy issues, offering educational and clinical services, and developing numerous research projects to help advance and inform public policy debate.
Happy reading
Rose
