Hastings Center News

Dan W. Brock Named 2018 Beecher Award Recipient

Dan W. Brock has been named the recipient of The Hastings Center’s 2018 Henry Knowles Beecher Award.

Throughout his career, Dr. Brock, the Francis Glessner Lee Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, has engaged with critical issues in biomedical ethics and health policy, including surrogate decision-making and voluntary euthanasia. He served as a staff philosopher on the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine from 1981 to 1982 and was a member of the ethics working group of the President Bill Clinton’s task force on national health reform in 1993.  He has been a consultant to numerous international and national bodies, including the Institute of Medicine and the World Health Organization. He is also a Fellow and a former member of the board of directors at The Hastings Center.

Dr. Brock received a BA in economics from Cornell University and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University. He is the author of Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision-Making (with Allen E. Buchanan, 1989), Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics (1993), and From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (with Allen E. Buchanan, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler, 2000).

The Hastings Center’s Henry Knowles Beecher Award recognizes individuals who have made a lifetime contribution to ethics and the life sciences and whose careers have been devoted to excellence in scholarship, research, and ethical inquiry. The award was named for the first recipient, a distinguished surgeon and anesthesiologist who, in the 1960’s, courageously exposed unethical practices in human subjects research in the United States. His investigations led to the development of federal research ethics standards and helped establish the field of bioethics.

Dr. Brock was honored at The Hastings Center’s Fellows meeting at the annual conference of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities on October 18. While he was unable to attend, he made remarks in a video, which was presented at the meeting.