Josephine Johnston is a New Zealand-trained lawyer with a Masters degree in bioethics and health law from the University of Otago. She joined the staff of the Hastings Center in August of 2003 as a Research Scholar.

At the Center, Ms. Johnston’s research currently focuses on the controversies over the use of psychotropic drugs and children and the debates over the meaning of neuroimages. She has written about the potential for patents to act as barriers to access essential medicines and biological materials, ethical issues arising in the management of financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research, stem cell research, and assisted reproduction. She is also Director of Research Operations at the Center and manages our visiting scholar and intern programs.

Before coming to the Hastings Center, Ms. Johnston worked on ethical and legal issues in gene therapy and stem cell research at Dalhousie University's Department of Bioethics in Halifax, Canada. She also spent a year as the research assistant for the NIH grant "Ethnicity, Citizenship, Family: Identity after the Human Genome Project" at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics. Before undertaking her Master's, she practiced law in both New Zealand and Germany.

Selected Publications:

Erik Parens and Josephine Johnston, Facts, Values, and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health 2009; 3:1.

Erik Parens, Josephine Johnston, and Jacob Moses, Do We Need Synthetic Bioethics, Science 2008; 321(5895): 1449.

Josephine Johnston, The Ethics of Outsourcing Surrogate Motherhood to India, The Medscape Journal of Medicine 2008; 10(3): 52

Erik Parens and Josephine Johnston, Understanding the Agreements and Controversies surrounding Childhood Psychopharmacology, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health 2008; 2:5, reprinted in Focus 2008; 6(3): 322-330.

Josephine Johnston, Tied up in Nots Over Genetic Parentage, Hastings Center Report 2007; 37(4):28-31.

Erik Parens and Josephine Johnston, Does it make sense to speak of neuroethics? EMBO Reports 2007; 8(Special Issue):S61-S64.

Josephine Johnston and Angela Wasunna, Patents, Biomedical Research, and Treatments: Examining Concerns, Canvassing Solutions, Hastings Center Report 2007; 37(1) (Special Report): S1-S36

Josephine Johnston, Paying Egg Donors: Exploring the Arguments, Hastings Center Report 2006; 36(1):28-31.