University of Virginia Health System

29 March 2006

From the Quick and the Dead:
Ethical Ways to Increase the Supply of Organs for Transplantation

James F. Childress, Ph.D., Institute for Practical Ethics, UVA

Richard J. Bonnie, L.L.B., School of Law, UVA

Timothy Pruett, M.D., Department of Surgery, UVA

More than 90,000 people in the U.S. are on the waiting list for organ transplants, while fewer than 30,000 transplantations are performed each year. Are there effective and ethical ways to increase the supply of transplantable organs from the living and the dead? This program explores several proposals, including financial incentives and presumed consent.

Jim Childress is the John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Education. He served as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, 1972 to 1975 and 1986 to 1994, as Principal of UVA’s Monroe Hill College from 1988 to 1991, and as co-director of the Virginia Health Policy Center from 1991 to 1999. In 1990 he was named Professor of the Year in the state of Virginia by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. In 2002 he received the University of Virginia's  highest honor, The Thomas Jefferson Award.
            Childress is the author of numerous articles and several books in ethics, especially biomedical and political ethics. His books in biomedical ethics include Principles of Biomedical Ethics (with Tom L. Beauchamp); Priorities in Biomedical Ethics (5th ed.); Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care; and Practical Reasoning in Bioethics. His other books include Dictionary of Christian Ethics (2nd ed.), co-edited with John Macquarrie, Civil Disobedience and Political Obligation, and Moral Reasoning in Conflicts.
            Childress was vice chair of the national Task Force on Organ Transplantation, and he has also served on the Board of Directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, the Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee, the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee, and several Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for NIH clinical trials. From 1996 to 2001, he served on the presidentially-appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission.
            Childress is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 1998, was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a fellow of the Hastings Center. He has  been the Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University (1975-79) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Princeton University. 
            He received his B.A. from Guilford College, his  B.D. from Yale Divinity School, and his  M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Richard Bonnie is an expert in the fields of criminal law and procedure, mental health and drug law, public health law, and bioethics.
            While in law school, Bonnie was notes and decisions editor for the Virginia Law Review, and a member of the Order of the Coif and the Raven Society. Immediately following his graduation in 1969, he became assistant professor at Virginia for one year before accepting the position of associate director of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. He returned to the Law School in the fall of 1973 after a three-year period of military and government service. He became Director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry  and Public Policy in 1979 and was appointed John S. Battle Professor of Law in 1987.
            Bonnie has been actively involved in public service throughout his academic career. He served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse (1975-80) and from 1979-1985, he was Chairman of Virginia's State Human Rights Committee, which is responsible for protecting the rights of residents and clients of Virginia's public mental health and mental retardation services system. Bonnie served from 1981 to 1988 on the Advisory Board for the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards Project and from 1988 to 1996 on the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mental Health and the Law. He is currently participating in the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Mandated Community Treatment and on an ABA Task Force on Mental Illness and the Death Penalty. He has served as an advisor to the American Psychiatric Association's Council on Psychiatry and Law since 1979.
            Bonnie was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He currently chairs an IOM/NRC committee on reducing tobacco use, and is serving on the IOM Committee on Increasing Rates of Organ Donation, the NRC Committee on Law and Justice, as well as the governing board for the Division on the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Bonnie has previously chaired IOM Committees on Underage Drinking (2002-03), Injury Prevention and Control (1997-98), and Opportunities in Drug Abuse Research (1995-96), as well as an NRC panel on Elder Abuse and Neglect (2001-02). Bonnie was vice-chair of the IOM Committee on Preventing Nicotine Dependence in Children and Youths (1993-94). He recently served on an IOM Committee to Assess the System for Protection of Human Research Subjects (2000-02), an IOM Committee to Assess the Science Base for Tobacco Harm Reduction (1999-2001), and a National Research Council Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs (1998-2001). In 2002 he was awarded the Yarmolinsky Medal for his extraordinary service to the IOM and the National Academies. 
            Bonnie has been deeply interested in issues involving psychiatry and human rights. In 1989 he was a member of the U.S. Department of State delegation that assessed changes in the Soviet Union relating to political abuse of psychiatry and performed a similar mission for the World Psychiatric Association in 1991. In 1993 he became a member of the Advisory Board of the Network of Reformers in Psychiatry in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and  in 1997 he became a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry.
            Bonnie is a Fellow of the Virginia Law Foundation. He is a Charter Fellow of the College on the Problems of Drug Dependence and has served twice on the Board of Directors of the College. He is Co-Chair of Physicians and Lawyers for National Drug Policy (PLNDP), an organization established in 2004 as a “public health partnership” to promote evidence-based policies relating to alcohol and other addictive drugs. He has received numerous awards, including the American Psychiatric Association's Isaac Ray Award in 1998 for his “contributions to forensic psychiatry and the psychiatric aspects of jurisprudence” and a Special Presidential Commendation from the APA in 2003. Bonnie has been a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology of Cambridge University and a visiting professor of law at Cornell Law School.   

Timothy Pruett isProfessor of Surgery and Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and the Head of the Division of Transplantation of theDepartment of Surgery of the UVA School of Medicine.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life