FALL MEETING IN NEW YORK CITY AND BIOETHICS FORUM Harold Edgar, LLB Harold Edgar is the Julius Silver Professor in Law, Science, and Technology and Director of the Julius Silver Program in Law, Science, and Technology at Columbia University and serves as the writing and research editor of the Columbia Law Review. He has taught in diverse areas, including constitutional law, contracts, criminal law, and law and science, and served with the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law from 1968­70. He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, a group that studies the social implications of innovation in biomedical technology. His principal current interests are law and technology and law and medicine. Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, MD Dr. Friedman is the Marilyn M. Simpson Professor and Director of the Starr Center for Human Genetics at the Rockefeller University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his B.S. and M.D. degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute­Albany Medical College. After completing a residency in internal medicine at Albany Medical College and entering a gastroenterology fellowship at Cornell University Medical College, he enrolled in the graduate program at Rockefeller, where he received his Ph.D. degree in molecular biology. Dr. Friedman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Among his honors is the 2001 Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for distinguished achievement in metabolic research. Dr. Paul Greengard, MD, 2000 Nobel Laureate Dr. Greengard is a member of The National Academy of Science and has received more than 50 major awards and honors for his groundbreaking neurobiological research. Dr. Greengard's pioneering work in delineating how neurons communicate with one another in the brain earned him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. During a half-century of research, he has arguably contributed more than any other single scientist to our understanding of the complex signaling processes that occur within each of the 100 billion or more nerve cells in the human brain. Understanding these processes enables us to comprehend not only the fundamental nature of brain function, but also what goes wrong in brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Dr. Greengard currently serves as the Vincent Astor Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience and Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research at The Rockefeller University. Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch, MD Dr. Jaenisch is one of the founders of transgenic science (gene transfer to create mouse models of human disease). His lab has produced mouse models leading to new understanding of cancers and various neurological diseases. He also has made important contributions to cloning technology. Jaenisch, a founding member of the Whitehead Institute and professor of biology at MIT, received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Munich in 1967. He came to the Whitehead from the University of Hamburg in Germany, where he was head of the Department of Tumor Virology at the Heinrich Pette Institute. Jaenisch is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1996, he was awarded the Boehringer Mannheim Molecular Bioanalytics Prize. He was named the first recipient of the Peter Gruber Foundation Award in Genetics in 2001. Jaenisch received the 2002 Robert Koch Prize for Excellence in Scientific Achievement. In 2003, he was awarded the Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Prize for basic research in oncology and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Josephine Johnston Ms. Johnston, a lawyer trained in New Zealand with a Master’s degree in bioethics and health law from the University of Otago, joined the Hastings Center in 2003 as Associate for Ethics, Law and Society. Before coming to the Hastings Center, Ms. Johnston worked on ethical and legal issues in gene therapy and stem cell research at Dalhousie University's Department of Bioethics in Halifax, Canada, where she was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Stem Cell Network of Canada. She also spent a year as the research assistant for the NIH grant "Ethnicity, Citizenship, Family: Identity after the Human Genome Project" at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics. She has written on the progress of human gene transfer and undertaken a survey of Canadian IVF clinics to determine the number of embryos available for research in that country. She is co-editor of a special issue of Developing World Bioethics dealing with the impact of genetics on identity issues. Dr. Thomas H. Murray, PhD Dr. Murray is President of The Hastings Center and was formerly the Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was also the Susan E. Watson Professor of Bioethics. As a member of the Hastings Center's research staff, he is currently principal investigator of several key projects. He is a founding editor of the journal Medical Humanities Review, and is on the editorial boards of Human Gene Therapy, Politics and the Life Sciences, Cloning, Science, and Policy, Teaching Ethics, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the New Zealand Bioethical Journal, and Medscape General Medicine. He served as a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee's Anti-Doping Committee, is currently a member of the Ethics and Education Committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency and served as a presidential appointee to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission from 1996-2001 where he served as chair of the subcommittee on genetics. He is former chair of the Social Issues Committee of the American Society for Human Genetics and currently a member of the Ethics Committee of HUGO, the Human Genome Organization. He has testified before Congressional committees, and is the author of more than 200 publications. His most recent books are The Worth of a Child, published by the University of California Press, and Healthcare Ethics and Human Values: An Introductory Text with Readings and Case Studies. Dr. Stephen Prescott, MD Dr. Prescott is executive director of Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine, and a leader in studies of the basic mechanisms of human disease. He was a founder and the director of the innovative Eccles Program in Human Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Utah, which applies the most modern, sophisticated methods of genetic and molecular biology research to the problems of human disease. Under Dr. Prescott's leadership, HCI has created programs to educate underserved populations about cancer prevention, detection, and care. He has been instrumental in making the Utah Population Database, the largest genetic database in the world, a powerful tool for genetic research. Dr. Prescott holds the H.A. and Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair in Human Molecular Biology and Genetics and serves on boards for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and scientific endeavors, as well as for business and economic development task forces and boards of directors. Dr. Harold Varmus, MD, 1989 Nobel Laureate Dr. Varmus began his career as a surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service, then moved to San Francisco, where he joined the University of California Medical Center. His work revolved around the study of Oncogenes. Oncogenes are normal genes that control growth in every living cell, but which under certain conditions can turn renegade and cancerous. In 1989, Dr. Varmus received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with fellow researcher Michael Bishop for their research on oncogenes. After receiving his Nobel Prize, Harold Varmus took on enormous new challenges. He became the first Nobel Laureate to be appointed head of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Varmus headed the NIH for 6 years, retiring in 2000. During that time, the NIH invested money in the Human Genome Project and coordinated the project with dozens of other health research institutes around the world. In January 2000, Dr. Varmus became President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.