Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Recognizes John Harris and Dorothy Roberts with 2025 Bioethics Founders’ Award
John Harris, FMedSci, FRSA, DPhil, Hon D.Litt, and Dorothy Roberts, JD, FCPP, Hon D.Sc, Hon LL.D, have been named recipients of the 2025 Bioethics Founders’ Award. The award, given annually by The Hastings Center for Bioethics, 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 will present the awards at a ceremony on October 23 at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) annual conference in Portland, Ore.
John Harris
John Harris is Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, a visiting professor in bioethics at King’s College London, and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Uehiro Oxford Institute of the University of Oxford.
He was a founding director of the International Association of Bioethics and is a founding member of the board of the journal Bioethics. He is a member of the editorial board of several journals, including the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. He has served as an ethics consultant to national and international bodies, including the European Parliament, the World Health Organization, the European Commission, and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). He frequently appears in the media to discuss biomedical ethics and related issues.
Harris is the author of numerous books, including The Value of Life: An Introduction to Medical Ethics (1985), On Cloning (2004), Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making People Better (2010), and How to Be Good: The Possibility of Moral Enhancement (2016). He has appeared as himself in novels by authors as diverse as Alexander McCall Smith (The Careful Use of Compliments) and Dean Koontz (One Door Away from Heaven).
Dorothy Roberts
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also Founding Director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society and a MacArthur Fellow.
An internationally acclaimed scholar, public intellectual, and social justice activist, Roberts has been a leader in transforming thinking on reproductive justice, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001),Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011), Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), and The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family (forthcoming 2026).
Other recognitions of her work include elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Medicine. Her TED Talk, “The Problem with Race-based Medicine,” has been viewed more than 1.6 million times.
John Harris and Dorothy Roberts are both Hastings Center Fellows. Learn more about the Bioethics Founders’ Award, including a list of all the recipients.
