Panelists
Robert
F. Murray, Jr.
Diane B. Paul
Gail S. Ross
Anita Silvers
LeRoy B. Walters
Video
Introduction to the Panelists and Moderator
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Robert
F. Murray, Jr.
physician
Chief,
Division of Medical Genetics, Department of Pediatrics and Child
Health; Chair, Graduate Department of Genetics and Human Genetics,
Howard University School of Medicine, Washington, D.C.; author
of works on human genetics, including Genetic Variation and
Disorders in Peoples of African Origin; member of advisory
groups for the federal government and the National Academy of
Sciences.
Detailed
Biography:
Dr.
Murray is a graduate of Union College, Schnectady, NY (BS) and the
University of Rochester Medical School (MD). He is board certified
in both internal medicine and medical genetics, his subspecialty.
His interest in genetics began when he studied genetic markers which
might indicate inherited susceptibility to disease during a tour
of duty in the US Public Health Service at NIH. He further pursued
his interest in genetics by earning a Master's degree during a 2
year fellowship in medical genetics at the University of Washington
in Seattle.
After joining the faculty of Medicine at Howard University, he pursued
genetic studies of alcohol metabolism and breast cancer. He also
became in involved in programs of genetic screening, counseling
and prenatal diagnosis with special emphasis on sickle cell disease.
A major research interest has been the study of the psychological
aspects of genetic counseling. More recently, he has been studying
the use of genetic markers to identify individuals susceptible to
injury from toxic compounds in the work environment and the effect
of these compoounds on the human genome.
He is currently Chief of the Division of Medical Genetics in the
Department of Pediatrics and Child Health, and Professor of Pediatrics,
Medicine and Genetics. He is also Chairman of the Graduate Department
of Genetics and Human Genetics in the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences which sponsors graduate programs offering both the Masters
and PhD degrees in genetics and the MS degree in Genetic Counseling.
He is an active member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the
National Academy of Sciences.
He has served on the IOM governing council and also on several National
Research Council and IOM taskforces and working groups. He is a
fellow and member of the Board of Directors of the Hastings Center
on Bioethics, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. He has served on special committees at NIH such as the
Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) and the Human Gene Therapy
Subcommittee of the RAC and the Working Group on Ethics, Law and
Social Issues (ELSI) of the National Center for Human Genome Research
at NIH.
He is co-author with Dr. James Bowman of a book entitled Genetic
Variation and Disorders in Peoples of African Origin published
in 1990 by Johns Hopkins University Press. He has also co-edited
3 other books the most recent of which deals with the potential
effect of the human genome project on heaslth care in the US. He
has also served on a number of committees and advisory groups for
the federal government and the National Academy of Sciences.
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Diane B. Paul
political scientist
Professor,
Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts at
Boston; author of Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present,
The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine
and the Nature-Nurture Debate, and other works on eugenics
and human genetics.
Detailed Biography:
Diane B. Paul
is Professor of Political Science and Co-director of the Program
in Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Massachusetts
at Boston and Research Associate in the Museum of Comparative Zoology
at Harvard University. She has been an Exxon Fellow at MIT, a fellow
of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a Resident Fellow of the Humanities
Research Institute of the University of California, and the recipient
of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
National Science Foundation.
Dr. Paul is
the author of Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present,
The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine and the
Nature-Nurture Debate, and other works on eugenics and human
genetics. Professor Paul's research interests include the historical
and policy issues in science, particularly biology and biomedicine.
She has published on the histories of eugenics and the nature-nurture
debate, science in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the politics
of agricultural research in the U.S., and contemporary bioethical
and policy issues in genetic testing . Her articles have appeared
in a wide range of journals including Nature, Genetics,
The Quarterly Review of Biology, Scientific American,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, The Journal of History
of Ideas, Science in Context, and Social Research.
She has received major grants from the National Science Foundation
and National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Gail S. Ross
psychiatrist
Research
Director, High-Risk Infant Follow-Up Program, and Chief Psychologist
for the Child Development Program, the Early Intervention Program,
and other clinics, New York Hospital, N.Y.; author of publications
on infant and child development.
Detailed Biography:
Dr.
Ross is the Research Director of the High-Risk Infant Follow-up
Program at New York Hospital,
as well as the Associate Attending in Psychology, and Director of
the Pediatric Psychology Program. She is also and Associate Professor
of Psychology in Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Cornell University
Medical College. Her degrees include as BA in Psychology from Barnard
University, an MA in Educational Psychology from the University
of Chicago, and a PhD from Harvard University in Personality and
Development.
She has served on numerous advisory boards, including the Recombinant
DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) at NIH, and the Early Childhood Direction
Center of New York Ciy.
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Anita Silvers
philosopher
Professor,
Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University; author
of books and essays on ethics and bioethics, aesthetics, feminism,
disability studies, and public policy including Disability,
Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics
and Public Policy; first recipient of the California Faculty
Association's Equal Rights Award.
Detailed Biography:
Dr.
Silvers is a Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University,
and the co-author of Disability, Difference, Discrimination:
Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy and of
Puzzles About Art. She has co-edited three volumes: Physician-Assisted
Suicide: Expanding the Debate, The Recombinant DNA Controversy,
and Sociobiology and Human Nature. She has authored many
scholarly essays in ethics and bioethics, aesthetics, feminism,
disability studies, and public policy, and she written on most of
these subjects for the popular press.
Silvers is a member of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical
Association, a former member of the National Endowment for the Humanities'
Council, and has served two terms as trustee of the Americn Society
for Aesthetics. In 1978, Silvers was California's Distinguished
Humanities Scholar, and in 1989 she was the first recipient of the
California Faculty Association's Equal Rights Award for her work
inmaking higher education accessible to people with disabilities.
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LeRoy B. Walters
bioethicist
Joseph
P. Kennedy, Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics, and Director, Kennedy
Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.;
past Chair, Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, National Institutes
of Health; author of The Ethics of Human Gene Therapy and
other books and articles on ethics and medicine.
Detailed Biography:
LeRoy Walters
was born in Illinois and spent his elementary and secondary school
years in Pennsylvania. He attended a small Pennsylvania liberal-arts
college, Messiah College, receiving his B.A. in 1962. After finishing
a B.D. degree at the Associated Mennonite Seminaries in 1965, Walters
studied for two years in Germany, one year at the University of
Heidelberg and one year at the Free University of Berlin. While
in Berlin, he also helped to organize East-West conferences in East
Berlin, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
In 1967 Walters
returned to the United States and began a Ph.D. program in the Department
of Religious Studies at Yale University. He finished his Ph.D. in
Christian ethics in the spring of 1971 on the topic "Five Classic
Just-War Theories: A Study in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Vitiria,
Suarez, Gentili, and Grotius. His dissertation received the Theron
Rockwell Field Prize from the university. During the summer of 1971,
Walters joined the newly-established Kennedy Institute of Ethics
and its Director, Andre Hellegers, as the first faculty member appointed
to a multi-year term. He has remained a member of the Kennedy Institute
since 1971.In
1975, Walters received an appointment as Assistant Professor of
Philosophy. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in
1980 and the rank of Professor in 1993. In the latter year he was
also named the Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics
at the Kennedy Institute. During the summer of 1996 Walters accepted
a three-year term as Director of the Kennedy Institute.
Since 1975 Walters
has been the editor and co-editor (with Joy Kahn) of the annual
Bibliography of Bioethics (22 volumes to date). He is also
co-editor (with Tom L. Beauchamp) of an anthology entitled Contemporary
Issues in Bioethics (4th ed., Wadsworth, 1994). In late 1994
Walters and co-author Julie Gage Palmer published a book entitled
The Ethics of Human Gene Therapy (Oxford University Press,
1997). Much of Walters’s research has been devoted to ethical issues
in human genetics. He teaches courses on "Ethics and Human Genetics"
and "Eugenics and Ethics." He has also served for three terms on
the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee of the National Institutes
of Health. From 1993 through 1996 he served as Chair of the committee,
which reviews human-gene-therapy protocols.
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