Chairman of President’s Bioethics Panel to Speak

Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, will deliver lectures at UT Southwestern Medical Center and at UT Dallas on Tuesday, Nov. 13.

Dr. Pellegrino will discuss:

• “The Doctor’s Ethics: What Has Changed, What Cannot Change,” which is the inaugural Daniel W. Foster, M.D. Lecture in Medical Ethics; noon at UT Southwestern. Junior Lecture Hall (D1.602) beneath the Eugene McDermott Plaza.
• “Patient Choice and the Physician Conscience: Collaboration or Conflict?” 7:30 p.m. in the Davidson Auditorium at UT Dallas.

In 2005, President Bush appointed Dr. Pellegrino to chair his Council on Bioethics, which advises the president on bioethical issues that have emerged as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology. Some of the issues studied the by the council include stem-cell research, cloning and end-of-life decisions.

For his lecture at UT Dallas, Dr. Pellegrino will talk about the shift from physician authority to patient authority, which he says has produced a growing tension between the patient’s desires and demands, and the physician’s personal and professional conscience. His talk is part of a lecture-discussion series exploring the relationship between human values and medicine, science and technology, sponsored by the School of Arts & Humanities.

Pellegrino is professor emeritus of medicine and medical ethics at the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Georgetown University Medical Center, a former director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a master of the American College of Physicians.

In 2004, Dr. Pellegrino became a member of the International Bioethics Committee of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a U.N. advisory committee that contemplates the ethical implications of scientific advances. He is the author or co-author of 24 books and the founding editor of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.