Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Recognizes Allen E. Buchanan and Bernard Lo with 2024 Bioethics Founders’ Award
Allen E. Buchanan, PhD, and Bernard Lo, MD, have been named recipients of the 2024 Bioethics Founders’ Award. The Bioethics Founders’ Award, given by The Hastings Center, recognizes individuals from around the world who have made substantial, sustained contributions to bioethics in ways that have advanced thinking and practice in medicine, the life sciences, and public policy.
Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky presented the awards at a ceremony on September 19 at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) annual conference in St. Louis.
Allen E. Buchanan
Dr. Buchanan is a moral, political, and legal philosopher. In recent years he has been Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University, a visiting professor of the philosophy of international law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College in London, and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University.
He has combined scholarship and teaching with policy work at the national and international levels. He has served as staff philosopher or as a consultant on all the presidential bioethics commissions, served as the only nonscientist on the advisory council for the National Human Genome Project, and has advised the U.S. State Department, the Canadian Government, and the President of Catalonia on matters of secession. He helped draft the Ethiopian Constitution’s secession clause in 1993.
He is the author or co-author of books and articles about major topics in bioethics, including Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (with Dan W. Brock, 1990); From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (with Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler, 2000); and two books on biomedical enhancement, Beyond Humanity (2011) and Better Than Human (2017).
Bernard Lo
Dr. Lo is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and Director of the Program in Medical Ethics Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco and President Emeritus of the Greenwall Foundation in New York, whose mission is to support bioethics research and young scholars in bioethics.
He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and chaired the Institute of Medicine committee that issued the 2009 report, Conflicts of Interest in in Medical Research, Education, and Practice. He also chaired National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committees on Sharing Clinical Trial Data (2015) and Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids for Acute Pain (2020), and he co-chaired the committee Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Issues Associated with Neural Cell Transplantation, Chimeras and Organoids (2021).
Currently, Dr. Lo is guest editor of the Fundamentals of Clinical Ethics series in the New England Journal of Medicine. He also serves on the medical advisory panel of Blue Cross/Blue Shield and is member of the Takeda Pharmaceuticals ethics advisory committee. Previously he was co-chair of the standards working group of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which recommended regulations for stem cell research funded by the state of California, and served on the board of directors of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs.
Dr. Lo and his colleagues have published around 250 peer-reviewed articles on ethical issues concerning decision-making near the end-of-life, stem cell research, oversight of human participants research, the doctor-patient relationship, and conflicts of interest. Dr. Lo is author of Resolving Ethical Dilemmas: A Guide for Clinicians (6th ed., 2019), a comprehensive textbook on ethical issues in clinical practice, and of Ethical Issues in Clinical Research (2010).
Dr. Buchanan and Dr. Lo are Hastings Center fellows.