John and Marsha Ryan Bioethicist in Residence | Simmons Law School | SIU

Jennifer S. Bard

Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law and Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine University of Cincinnati College of Medicine

October 13, 2021 at 5 p.m.

This will be a Zoom Webinar: https://bit.ly/2021-ryan-bioethicist
Webinar ID: 893 8567 3885
Passcode:356919

Achieving Social Justice in the Equitable Distribution of the Benefits of Biomedical and Social Science Research: Legal, Ethical, and Public Health Perspectives.

People living with disabilities in the United States have poorer health outcomes than the general population according to every measurable indicator. These disparities have been highlighted over the last 18 months as people living with disabilities have been at increased risk of catching Covid-19, developing severe symptoms, and dying from its complications. Many researchers have identified their near exclusion from biomedical and social science research as being both caused by and associated with these results. Not only is this exclusion ethically wrong, but, as this talk will highlight, it is scientifically unjustified and legally impermissible under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Jennifer S. Bard is a professor of law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law where she also holds an appointment as professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. She has a B.A. from Wellesley College, J.D. from Yale Law School, Master’s in Public Health from the University of Connecticut, and a Ph.D. in Higher Education from Texas Tech University. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics and the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at Georgetown Law and a visiting professor at the University of Florida, the University of Iceland’s Law Faculty, and in the LLM program at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She is also an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Glenn Cohen

Deputy Dean, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

March 22-23, 2021

March 22, 2021 at 5 p.m.

Watch Lesar Lecture here: https://echo360.org/media/0f97c63c-8727-47d8-b94a-e598c216a7f8/public

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues

Hospital systems, device makers, and AI developers are spending huge amounts of money to bring Artificial Intelligence, especially machine learning, into health care. These efforts raise formidable logistical and design challenges, but also serious ethical and legal questions. This talk will examine some of those questions including privacy, liability, informed consent, discrimination, and regulatory models.

Lecture is free and open to the public

Professor Glenn Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. From Seoul to Krakow to Vancouver, Professor Cohen has spoken at legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world and his work has appeared in or been covered on PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and several other media venues. Prof. Cohen’s current projects relate to big data, health information technologies, mobile health, reproduction/reproductive technology, research ethics, organ transplantation, rationing in law and medicine, health policy, FDA law, translational medicine, and medical tourism.

Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, Ph.D.

February 26-28, 2020

February 26, 2020 at 5 p.m.
Public lecture in Carbondale

Medical Aid in Dying: Assessing the Illinois Patient Choices at End of Life Act

Nearly 110,000 Illinoisans die every year. Many of these patients want control over the timing and manner of their death. Indeed, terminally ill patients in Illinois already have and use several legal “exit options.” But they generally do not have access to medical aid in dying (MAID). This may soon change. Across the country, access to MAID has been in a rapid state of flux. Ten years ago, MAID was available in only two U.S. jurisdictions. Today, it is available in ten. This presentation reviews the history, status, and prevalence of MAID in the United States. It also summarizes new points of ethical debate over whether traditional eligibility requirements and safeguards are too permissive or too restrictive. 

Lecture is free and open to the public.

See the invitation here.

.Thaddeus Mason Pope is a foremost expert on medical law and clinical ethics. He maintains a special focus on patient rights and healthcare decision-making.

Pope is Director of the Health Law Institute at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota. While he serves in a range of consulting capacities, Pope has been particularly influential through his extensive, high-impact scholarship. Ranked among the Top 20 most cited health law scholars in the United States, Professor Pope has over 220 publications in leading medical journals, bioethics journals, and law reviews. He coauthors the definitive treatise The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decisionmaking, and he runs the Medical Futility Blog (with over four million page-views).

Alex John London, Ph.D.

March 20-22, 2018

March 20, 2019 at 5 p.m.
Public lecture in Carbondale

“Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Does Accountability Require Explainability?” 

Breakthroughs in machine learning are enabling of artificial intelligence (AI) to perform a wide range of diagnostic and predictive tasks in medicine. This prospect has prompted utopian hype, as well as dystopian hysteria, dramatizing the importance of ensuring that systems involved in life-and-death decisions merit public trust. Essential to securing such trust are clear practices and procedures to ensure accountability and respect for the freedom of stakeholders.

A common proposal for achieving these goals imposes requirements like explainability or interpretability that seek to lay out the operation of such systems to human inspection. Because the most powerful AI systems are often opaque “black-boxes,” these requirements may be purchased at the price of reduced predictive accuracy.

Professor London will argue that such requirements are misguided in domains—such as medicine—where our knowledge of fundamental causal relationships is precarious and under-developed. Instead, we should promote trust and accountability by clearly defining the tasks such systems can perform, the conditions necessary to ensure acceptable system performance, and rigorously validating their accuracy under those well-defined conditions.

Lecture is free and open to the public.

See the invitation here.

Alex John London, Ph.D., is the Clara L. West Professor of Ethics and Philosophy and Director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center whose work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. He is co-editor of Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, one of the most widely used textbooks in medical ethics and has published more than 85 papers in leading philosophy journals (such as Mind and the Philosopher’s Imprint), high-impact science and medical journals (such as Science, eLife, JAMA, The Lancet, and PLoS Medicine), as well as numerous other journals and collections. Professor London’s work on ethics and AI examines the nature of algorithmic bias, how to encode alternative models of moral decision making in formal systems, social trust, and the nature and source of uncertainty in AI systems.

For more than a decade Professor London has helped to shape key ethical guidelines for the oversight of research with human participants. From 2012-2016, he was a member of the Working Group on the Revision of CIOMS 2002 International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects. Prior to that, he was an expert commentator at three World Medical Association meetings for the revision of the 2013 Declaration of Helsinki. From 2007-2018, he was a member of the ethics working group of the U.S. HIV Prevention Trials Network where he was part of the group that drafted the HIV Prevention Trials Network Ethics Guidance for Research. From 2016-2017, he was part of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine Committee on Clinical Trials During the 2014-15 Ebola Outbreak, and, from 2016-2018, he was a member of the U.S. Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Blood and Tissue Safety and Availability. He has served as an ethics expert in consultations with numerous national and international organizations, including: the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the World Medical Association, and the World Bank.

Dr. Alice Dreger

March 21-23, 2018

March 21, 2018 at 5 p.m.
Public lecture in Carbondale

Who Should Count as a Woman on the Playing Field? The Question of Intersex and Trans in Sports

Many sports have historically been divided by gender (man/woman), although we’ve generally pretended the division is by sex (male/female). The more that we learn about gender and sex, the more we know the drawing of sex and gender divisions is not so easy. So, what should happen in sports? This lecture explores this question, taking into account developmental biology, the nature of sport (including the value of fairness), and social justice concerns. Dr. Alice Dreger, who has consulted on this question with the International Olympic Committee’s Medical Commission, will parse out the issues and offer a few possible solutions.

Listen to Dreger's WSIU radio interview.
See Alice Dreger's presentation.

Alice Dreger is an historian of medicine and science, a sex researcher, a mainstream writer, and an (im)patient advocate. An award-winning scholar and writer, Dreger’s latest major work is Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, which argues that the pursuit of evidence is the most important ethical imperative of our time. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship and published by Penguin Press, the book has been praised in many reviews, including in The New Yorker, Nature, Science, Forbes, New York Magazine, and Salon. It was named an “Editor’s Choice” by The New York Times Book Review, where Dreger was labeled “a sharp, disruptive scholar.” The Chronicle of Higher Education has called her a “star scholar” and, in a feature on her career, described Dreger’s writing as “reliably funny and passionate and vulnerable.”

Dreger earned her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University in 1995. She has embodied the idea of the public intellectual, simultaneously publishing widely-cited major original work in scholarly journals and high-visibility essays in the mainstream press. She has served as a regular writer for the health sections of The Atlantic and Pacific Standard and for the blog of Psychology Today, and her op-eds have appeared in numerous other venues, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, WIRED, Slate, The LA Times, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and New Statesman. Her live-tweeting of her son’s sex ed class in April, 2015, sparked an international discussion of abstinence-based education and led to her recently publishing The Talk: Helping Your Kids Navigate Sex in the Real World, a short guidebook for parents commissioned by Amazon Kindle Singles.

Besides functioning as an historian and writer, in the medical world Dreger has served as a patient advocate and consultant to pediatric specialists undertaking clinical reform, particularly in the treatment of children born with norm-challenging body types, including intersex, conjoined twinning, facial anomalies, and short stature. Former chair of the Intersex Society of North America, she also served as an ethics consultant to an NIH-funded Translational Research Network on pediatric intersex care and co-edited a medical education guide on LGBT and Differences of Sex Development (DSD) for the Association of American Medical Colleges. She has been on the faculty of several major universities, including most recently (2005-2015) as a full professor in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. For Cambridge University Press, she is currently co-editing with Françoise Baylis a collection of first-person stories called Bioethics in Action. Dreger’s TEDx lecture, “Is Anatomy Destiny,” has been viewed more than 1 million times, and she has appeared as a guest expert on hundreds of media programs, including on Oprah, Savage Love, Good Morning America, and NPR, and in many original documentaries, including for A&E, ABC, Discovery, PBS, and HBO. A native of New York, she now lives in East Lansing, Michigan.

Leigh Turner, Ph.D., M.A.

October 18-20, 2016

October 18, 2016 at 5 p.m.
Public lecture in Carbondale

Direct-to-Consumer Marketing of Unproven Stem Cell Interventions: Ethical, Legal, and Scientific Concerns

1.0 hour CLE

Listen to WSIU interview with Dr. Leigh Turner here.

October 20, 2016 at 9 a.m.
SIU School of Medicine | South Auditorium | 801 N. Rutledge Street | Springfield, IL

From "Stem Cell Tourism" to U.S. Business Marketing Stem Cell Treatments: Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Related to Clinics Selling Unproven Stem Cell Interventions

Leigh Turner is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics and School of Public Health. Turner is a co-editor of "Risks and challenges in Medical Tourism: Understanding the Global Market for Health Services" and "The View from Here: Bioethics and the Social Services". He is the author of numerous publications examining ethical and social issues related to transnational medical travel and globalization of health care. Turner's current research addresses ethical, legal and regulatory concerns associated with U.S. and international clinics marketing unproven and unlicensed cell-based interventions. In particular, he is investigating the global proliferation of clinics marketing "stem cell treatments" for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson disease, multiple sclerosis and many other diseases.

Thaddeus Mason Pope, J.D., Ph.D.

Director, Health Law Institute, Hamline University School of Law

April 15, 2015

"When Are You Dead?  Expanding Objections to Brain Death and Recommended Responses"

For decades, the determination of death by neurological criteria (“brain death”) has been legally established as death in all U.S. jurisdictions and in most developed countries on Earth.  Furthermore, not only are the standards for determining death well-settled but so are the practical consequences of the determination.  Once a patient is determined dead, clinicians typically discontinue physiological support (except for organ procurement).  But notwithstanding this legal consensus, laws in three states (New Jersey, New York, and California) require hospitals to "accommodate" families who object to brain death.  Recently, there has been an increasing push for similar accommodation in other states.  How should clinicians and policymakers respond? 

Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD, is Director of the Health Law Institute and Associate Professor of Law at Hamline University. He is also an Adjunct Professor with the Australian Centre for Health Law Research at Queensland University of Technology, and an Adjunct Associate Professor with the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College.

Professor Pope has over 100 publications in leading medical journals, law reviews, bar journals, nursing journals, bioethics journals, and book chapters. He coauthored the definitive treatise The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decision making. He also runs the popular Medical Futility Blog (medicalfutility.blogspot.com), reporting and discussing legislative, judicial, regulatory, medical, and other developments concerning end-of-life medical treatment.

Prior to joining academia, Pope practiced at Arnold & Porter LP and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He earned a JD and PhD in philosophy and bioethics from Georgetown University.

Judith F. Daar, A.B., J.D.

Whittier Law School, CA

April 4, 2014

8:30 am

Room 251 (Videocast from the SIU School of Medicine)

"Currents in Reproductive Medicine: Examining the Opportunities and Limits of Genetic Selection" 

Recent advances in embryology and reproductive medicine enable prospective parents to learn much about the genetic make-up of their future offspring, including the sex and health profile of a child-to-be. Whether parents can or should utilize this information in their reproductive decision-making is the subject of intense debate in legal, medical and ethical circles. This lecture will review the current state of reproductive technologies from the perspectives of law, medicine and ethics, inviting attendees to consider whether opportunities for genetic selection should be embraced, restricted or regarded in some alternate manner.  

News Release

From 2008 to 2012, Judith Daar served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Whittier Law School. Since joining the faculty in 1990, Dean Daar has focused her teaching and Scholarship at the intersection of law, medicine and ethics. Holding a joint appointment at the law school and the UCI School of Medicine, she enjoys teaching future doctors and lawyers about what each can learn from these companion professional disciplines. In 2012 she was elected to the American Law Institute. In 2005, Dean Daar became Chair of the Association of American Law School’s Section on Law, Medicine and Health Care, and in 2006 she was named to the Board of Directors of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics. She was elected President of ASLME in 2009 and re-elected for a second term in 2010. In 2007, she was appointed to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Committee on Informed Consent inART, an interdisciplinary group of physicians and attorneys charged with drafting a model informed consent document for patients undergoing in vitro fertilization.

In 2008, Dean Daar was appointed to the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a group responsible for drafting policies to guide practitioners in the field of assisted conception. She is a member of the UCI Medical Center Medical Ethics Committee, where she serves on the Bioethics Consultation Team. She has also served as a member of the Harbor-UCLA Hospital Institutional Review Board, and theABA Coordinating Group on Bioethics. Dean Daar has lectured extensively in the field of reproductive medicine, including giving testimony to the National Academies of Science, Committee on Science, Technology, and Law on the issue of oversight and regulation of reproductive medicine. Her Scholarship focuses in the area of reproductive technologies where she has authored numerous articles on topics including stem cell research, human cloning, frozen embryo disputes, the use of genetic technologies and the regulation of reproductive medicine. Her book,Reproductive Technologies and the Law, was published in January 2006. A forthcoming book, The New Eugenics: Selective Breeding in an Era of Reproductive Medicine, will be published by Yale University Press.

Kevin FitzGerald, SJ, PhD

March 20, 2013

"The Promise and Peril of Personalized Medicine" 

Kevin FitzGerald, S.J., Ph.D., is the Dr. David Lauler Chair of Catholic Health Care Ethics in the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University. He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology at the Georgetown University Medical Center. He received a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, and a Ph.D. in bioethics, from Georgetown University. His research efforts focus on the investigation of abnormal gene expression in cancer, and on ethical issues in biomedical research. He has published both scientific and ethical articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, and in the popular press.

Father FitzGerald has given presentations nationally and internationally, and often been interviewed by the news media, on such topics as human genomic research, cloning, stem cell research, and personalized medicine. He is a founding member of Do No Harm, a member of the ethics committee for the March of Dimes, and a member of the Stem Cell Research Commission for the State of Maryland. In addition, he served until March 2009 as a member of the DHHS Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society.

Rebecca Susan Dresser, B.A., M.S., J.D.

March 28, 2012

"When Seriously Ill Patients Make Bad Treatment Decisions"

Rebecca Dresser is the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law and Professor of Ethics in Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 1983, she has taught medical and law students about legal and ethical issues in end-of-life care, biomedical research, genetics, assisted reproduction, and related topics. Before coming to Washington University, she taught at Baylor College of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University. In 2003, she was a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Tokyo, where she taught a short course in law and bioethics.

Professor Dresser received her law degree from Harvard Law School. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center and is one of the "At Law" columnists for the Hastings Center Report. Her book, When Science Offers Salvation: Patient Advocacy and Research Ethics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. She is a co-author of The Human Use of Animals: Case Studies in Ethical Choice (Oxford University Press, 2d Edition, 2008) and Bioethics and Law: Cases, Materials and Problems (West Publishing Co., 2003). She also is editor of and contributor to the forthcoming Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Professor Dresser has written commissioned papers for the National Academy of Sciences and National Bioethics Advisory Commission. From 2002-2009, she was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. In 2011, she was appointed to the National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee.

Paul A. Lombardo, PHD, JD

April 6, 2011

"Blood Libel and Generational Curses: the Legacy of American Eugenics"

This lecture will explore how the ancient idea of guilt passed down through families took root in 19th Century degeneracy theory and eventually found expression in the propaganda of the 20th Century eugenics movement. The case of Carrie Buck, which gave voice to the most infamous legal condemnation in Supreme Court history: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," will be explored as the foremost legal analog of this idea.

Paul A. Lombardo is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta. He was trained as both an historian and as a lawyer, and he holds a B.A. from Rockhurst College (Kansas City, Mo.), an M.A. from Loyola University of Chicago, and both the Ph.D. and J.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. From 1985-1990 he practiced law in California. From 1990 until 2006 he served on the faculty of the Schools of Law and Medicine at the University of Virginia, where he was the Director of the Center for Mental Health Law at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy, then the Director of the Program in Law and Medicine in the Center for Biomedical Ethics.

Professor Lombardo’s more than 250 publications contain book chapters, encyclopedia entries, case reports, reviews and scholarly articles. His books include the award-winning Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell (2008) and A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (2011), as well as a bioethics text: Fletcher’s Clinical Ethics, (3rd edition, 2005). He has spoken at more than 100 colleges, universities and medical centers in the U.S. and recently also lectured in Canada, Italy, Russia and Pakistan.

Professor Lombardo was recently appointed as a Senior Advisor to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues in DC. 

Harry R. (Rick) Moody, Ph.D.

March 31, 2010

"Bioethics Meets Politics:
What Can We Learn from the Battle for Healthcare Reform?"

“Death Panels?” “Rationing” health care? Damaging Medicare? How do we find the truth when the public has become so confused? How can bioethics contribute to more enlightened discourse about just health care in an aging society?

Harry R. Moody is currently Director of Academic Affairs for AARP.

Dr. Moody is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a number of books including: Abundance of Life: Human Development Policies for an Aging Society (Columbia University Press, 1988); Ethics in an Aging Society (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Aging: Concepts and Controversies, a gerontology textbook now in its 3rd edition. His most recent book, The Five Stages of the Soul, was published by Doubleday Anchor Books (1997).

A graduate of Yale (1967) and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University (1973), Dr. Moody taught philosophy at Columbia, Hunter College, New York University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. From 1999 to 2001 he served as National Program Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Faith in Action and, from 1992 to 1999, was Executive Director of the Brookdale Center at Hunter College. Before coming to Hunter, he served as Administrator of Continuing Education Programs for the Citicorp Foundation and later as Co-Director of the National Aging Policy Center of the National Council on Aging in Washington, DC. Moody is known nationally for his work in older adult education and recently stepped down as Chairman of the Board of Elderhostel. He has also been active in the field of biomedical ethics and holds appointment as an Adjunct Associate of the Hastings Center.

William J. Winslade, Ph.D., J.D.

March 18, 2009

"The Puzzles of Pedophilia:Unanswered Questions and Problematic Policies"

This lecture explores why causes of pedophilia remain uncertain. Diagnoses are elusive, treatments seem ineffective, and neither imprisonment nor involuntary hospitalization provides satisfactory solutions. The Texas voluntary orchiectomy statute for incarcerated pedophiles will illustrate why these complex problems seem insoluble.

William J. Winslade is the James Wade Rockwell Professor of Philosophy of Medicine, Professor of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, a member of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His background includes a Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University, a J.D. from UCLA Law School, a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, and an Honorary D.H.L. from Monmouth College.

He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, was a member of the California Bar Association from 1976 to 2004, and is currently a research psychoanalyst. Philosophic, legal, and psychoanalytic ideas are applied in his work to the study of human values in science, medicine, technology and law. His book, Confronting Traumatic Brain Injury: Devastation, Hope and Healing, was published by Yale University Press. He has written on topics such as privacy and confidentiality, human rights, death and dying, and legal and ethical aspects of mental health practice. legal and ethical aspects of mental health practice. He is currently writing The Birth, Life, and Death of the Brain: Legal and Ethical Perspectives with Stacey Tovino, J.D., Ph.D.

Mark A. Rothstein

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

"Health Privacy in the Electronic Age"

As health providers and agencies race to link networks of electronic health records, will it be possible to protect health privacy?

Mark A. Rothstein holds the Herbert F. Boehl Chair of Law and Medicine and is Director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. He received his B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and his J.D. from Georgetown University.

Professor Rothstein is a leading authority on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics, privacy, occupational health, employment law, and public health law. He is Chair of the Subcommittee on Privacy and Confidentiality of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, the statutory advisory committee to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on health information policy, including the privacy regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. He is the immediate past-President of the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

He is the author or editor of 19 books. His latest book is Genetics: Ethics, Law and Policy (with Andrews & Mehlman).