From Assisted Reproduction to Advanced Illness: The Circle of Life

Panel members:
Michael Gusmano joined The Hastings Center as a research scholar in January 2010. He is also an associate professor of health policy and management at New York Medical College and holds adjunct appointments at Columbia and Yale universities. At the Hastings Center, Gusmano investigates health care equity in the US and other countries. He is also developing a project with fellow Hastings Center scholar Nancy Berlinger that examines the ethical and policy dimensions of care for patients with chronic cancer.

Josephine Johnston is a research scholar at The Hastings Center. She is a New Zealand-trained lawyer with a master’s degree in bioethics and health law from the University of Otago. She joined the staff of the Hastings Center in August of 2003 as a research scholar. Her research focuses on controversial uses of medicine and biomedical technologies. She is particularly interested in conceptual and practice issues in psychiatry, stem cell research, and assisted reproduction. She is currently working on three projects: an interdisciplinary investigation of the meaning of neuroimages, an ethics and policy study of the multiple birth rate following fertility treatment, and development of a bioethics program for high school students.

Robin Marantz Henig is a freelance science writer and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her articles have also appeared in Scientific American, Seed, Discover and numerous women’s magazines. In addition, she writes book reviews and occasional essays for the Washington Post, as well as articles for the science section, op-ed page, and book review section of The New York Times. Henig won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 2001 writing about the life and legacy of Paul de Kruiff. She has written several science books, most recently covering the early days of in-vitro fertilization research and the controversy surrounding the world’s first test-tube baby in Pandora’s Baby, which won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Moderator:
Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D., is a medical writer, adjunct professor of journalism at The Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and managing editor of the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She received her B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied history and sociology of science. She has an M.S. from The Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University; and an M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine. She has worked as a medical writer for the London bureau of The Associated Press and was the London bureau chief of Physicians’ Weekly. She has had articles published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, Parents, More, and Harper’s Bazaar, among other newspaper and magazines. She lives in New York City with her husband, four children, two dogs, and a tortoise. Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank is her first book.

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