School of Medicine

News and Publications

January 13, 2005

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Dr. Leon Kass to speak at Dean's Distinguished Lecture Jan. 31

President Bush appointed Dr. Kass to Council on Bioethics in 2001

Leon R. Kass, M.D., Ph.D., chairman of President George Bush's Council on Bioethics and the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, will deliver the Dean's Distinguished Lecture at Scott Hall on Monday, Jan. 31.

Dr. Kass, who is also a Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute, will speak on "Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness." The lecture will be at 4 p.m. in Blue Auditorium followed by a question-and-answer session as well as a reception.

A native of Chicago, Dr. Kass was educated at the University of Chicago, where he earned his bachelor's and medical degrees in 1958 and 1962, respectively. He completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard in 1967 before going on to conduct research in molecular biology at the National Institutes of Health while serving in the U.S. Public Health Service.

Dr. Kass has been engaged for more than 30 years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advance and, more recently, with broader moral and cultural issues. From 1970 to 1972, Dr. Kass served as executive secretary of the Committee on the Life Sciences and Social Policy of 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 advance.

He taught at St. John's College, in Annapolis, Md., and 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, where he has since been an award-winning teacher deeply involved in undergraduate education and committed to the study of classic text.

Dr. Kass has authored numerous articles and books, including "The Ethics of Human Cloning," with James Q. Wilson in 1998; "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics" in 2002; and "The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis" in 2003.

His widely reprinted essays in biomedical ethics have dealt with issues raised by in vitro fertilization, cloning, genetic screening and genetic technology, organ transplantation, aging research, euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the moral nature of the medical profession.

In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Dr. Kass Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.

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