Steven Miles is Our Hero

The 2004 Minnesotan of the Year is bioethics scholar Miles, who as a result is the subject of this outstanding profile in Minnesota Monthly by Ann M. Bauer. [thanks Carl Elliott via MCW]

Neuroethics Profile

Martha Farah of Penn is profiled in Science Daily.

Guest Blogger Linda Glenn

New to the bioethics.net blogosphere is Linda MacDonald Glenn. She's great and an old friend. Here's some info on her:

LINDA MACDONALD GLENN, JD, LLM (Biomedical Ethics, McGill) is a bioethicist, attorney, educator and consultant. Formerly a fellow with the Institute of Ethics with the American Medical Association, her research encompasses the legal, ethical, and social impact of emerging technologies and evolving notions of personhood. Prior to returning to an academic setting, she consulted and practiced as a trial attorney with an emphasis in patient advocacy, bioethical and biotechnology issues, end of life decision-making, reproductive rights, genetics, parental/biological "nature vs. nurture", and animal rights issues; she was the lead attorney in several "cutting edge" bioethics legal cases. She has advised governmental leaders and agencies, and published numerous articles in professional journals. She has taught at the University Of Vermont School Of Nursing, the Medical College of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School and the University of Health Sciences Antigua, and has addressed public and professional groups internationally. Her extensive experience and passion for the issues facing the legal, nursing, and healthcare professions make her a compelling and thought-provoking lecturer. More about her background can be seen here.

The Voice of Bioethics at Berkeley

This profile of Guy Micco is really touching and gives a sense of what bioethics is like in the San Francisco bay area. Micco is a recently retired internist who for some time chaired the ethics committee at Alta Bates. Today he teaches students in the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program, who take basic science and electives at Berkeley and get clinical practice at UCSF. He heads the UC-B School of Public Health’s Center on Aging and its Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law (CMHL). One anecdote from the profile:

A former patient of Micco, Laqueur tells the story of the renowned ethicist Bernard Williams, who often went head to head with Micco, during the years he taught at Berkeley, over philosophical questions. “I can’t bear Micco and all his nonsense!” Williams was known to say of Micco’s belief in the capacity of the arts and humanities to “humanize.” But then Williams got sick, and none of the doctors at Oxford University, where he was then teaching, could diagnose his ailment. He asked to be seen by Micco — “who figured it out in 30 minutes,” Laqueur says. “He’s a brilliant diagnostician.”

And what is he like in his role?

Laqueur views him as an “unsung hero of campus” — a faculty member whose contributions don’t lie in the realm of publication, scholarship, or administrative acumen, but who nonetheless has made an “enormous impact on students and the ethical environment. In another age he would have been a religious leader or one of these doctors who would have had a cultish following.”

In this age, however, in Micco’s more modest estimation, he’s one man doing his bit in the interval between birth and death. “Every so often, when medicine gets too biomedical, too heavy into the technological,” he says, “someone calls for a corrective: ‘we need to turn back to the human element, the doctor-patient relationship.’ That’s happening now around the country, and the humanities play a key role…. I feel I’m a small part of that movement.”

See The Wizard

John Kwon has been the often quiet voice behind the design of The American Journal of Bioethics' website for years. John is the most amazing graphic/web design person with whom I've ever worked since I started the first philosophy website back in 1994. In the four years that John has been with my team, he has helped make bioethics.net the most visited site in bioethics (it was the first as well), and that site in turn has helped propel the journal and numerous other projects (e.g., bioethics for high school students, bioethics for beginners, and my favorite recent project (ok, well, so I was the PI on this and maybe I am biased...), the bioethics 'studio' project, today called Penn Studio). You'd never know it from a casual conversation with him - he's much too modest - but John is the guy behind the curtain. It is about time someone pushed him into the spotlight he's created. - GM

Denver Post on Bioethicist Marilyn Coors

Pete Coors is running for Senate in Colorado, and so once again his wife Marilyn is in the news as a career bioethicist. This profile is not a puff piece but nor is it especially in depth about Marilyn Coors' research. Coors discusses her role as scholar in relation to the role she would hold were Pete Coors elected.