Ezekiel Emanuel

Who Should Get the Liver for Transplantation? The Ethics of Allocating Scarce Resources.

The Arsht Distinguished Speaker Series continued on October 30, 2009 with a special presentation by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. 

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, Co-Director of the Health Transformation Institute, and on leave as Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. From January 2009 to January 2011, he served as special advisor for health policy to the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House. From 1997 to 2011, he was chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. He is also a breast oncologist.

After completing Amherst College, he received his M.Sc. from Oxford University in Biochemistry. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University. His dissertation received the Toppan Award for the finest political science dissertation of the year. In 1987-88, he was a fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and his oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Emanuel was an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School before joining the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Emanuel developed The Medical Directive, a comprehensive living will that has been endorsed by Consumer Reports on Health, Harvard Health Letter, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He has published widely on the ethics of clinical research, health care reform, international research ethics, end of life care issues, euthanasia, the ethics of managed care, and the physician-patient relationship in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, and many other medical journals. His book on medical ethics, The Ends of Human Life, has been widely praised and received honorable mention for the Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He has also published No Margin, No Mission: Health-Care Organizations and the Quest for Ethical Excellence and co-edited Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research: Readings and Commentary. Dr. Emanuel has written extensively for the popular press, with articles and op-eds appearing in The Atlantic, The New Republic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

Dr. Emanuel has received numerous awards including election to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Science and the Association of American Physicians. Hippocrates Magazine selected him as Doctor of the Year in Ethics. He received the AMA-Burroughs Welcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the John Mendelsohn Award from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and a Fulbright Scholarship (which he declined).

Dr. Emanuel served on President Clinton’s Health Care Task Force, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), and on the bioethics panel of the Pan-American Healthcare Organization. Dr. Emanuel has been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, UCLA, the Brin Professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the Kovitz Professor at Stanford Medical School.

For more information about the Arsht Ethics Initiatives, click here.