The Harrelson Lecture Fund Committee Proudly Presents
Dr. Leon Kass
"The Challenge For Bioethics"
February 20, 2006, Stewart Theatre, 3:00 p.m. ===================================================

Dr. Kass is the former Chair of the President's Council on Bioethics.  He also holds the Addie Clark Harding Professorship in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (on leave of absence), and is the Hartog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute.

Dr. Kass received his B.S. and M.D. degrees from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard.  He conducted research in molecular biology at the National Institutes of Health, while serving in the United States Public Health Service.

Dr. Kass has been engaged for over thirty years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advances. From 1970-72, he served as Executive Secretary of the Committee on the Life Sciences and Social Policy at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, whose report, Assessing Biomedical Technologies, provided one of the first overviews of the emerging moral and social questions posed by biomedical advances. 

Dr. Kass also served as the Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Research Professor in Bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, before returning in 1976 to the University of Chicago.  He has been a member of the National Council on the Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him Chair of the President's Council on Bioethics.

His books include: Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs; The Hungry Soul: Eating the Perfecting of Our Nature; The Ethics of Human Cloning (with James Q. Wilson); Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (with Amy A. Kass); Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics; and, most recently, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.   His widely reprinted essays in biomedical ethics have dealt with issues raised by in vitro fertilization, cloning, genetic screening and genetic technology, organ transplantation, euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the moral nature of the medical profession.