| Full name | Jonathan D. Moreno |
|---|---|
| Born | June 11, 1952 |
| Main interests | Bioethics, neuroethics, history of science, philosophy, national security |
| Notable ideas | bioethical naturalism, neurosecurity |
Jonathan D. Moreno is a philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine.
Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and served on the Obama-Biden Transition Project in 2008 as the Director of the Department of Health and Human Services Agency Review for Bioethics.
Moreno is a senior advisor for the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and served on the senior staff of the Clinton Administration’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission and the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
Jonathan D. Moreno was born and grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley. His father, J.L. Moreno, was a psychiatrist and the pioneer of psychodrama, the precursor of social network theory. His father and mother, psychotherapist Zerka T. Moreno, worked closely together. Both of his parents emigrated to the United States from Europe before World War II. Moreno and his older sister, Regina Moreno, spent much of their childhood in Beacon, New York on the grounds of their parents’ sanitarium and psychodrama training center.
Moreno attended Hofstra University where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and psychology with highest honors in 1973. From 1973 to 1975 he was a graduate student in the philosophy doctoral program in the CUNY Graduate Center and completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis in 1977. Moreno’s doctoral dissertation traced the development of a distinctly American semiotic tradition from Charles S. Peirce to Nelson Goodman. His dissertation director was Richard S. Rudner, the longtime editor of the Journal of the Philosophy of Science.
Following graduation, Moreno held full-time academic appointments in philosophy at Swarthmore College, the University of Texas at Austin, and George Washington University. During 1984-85 he was an associate at the Hastings Center, the first bioethics think tank. From 1985-1987 he was philosopher-in-residence at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC.
He was the director of the Program in Medical Humanities and a Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at the SUNY Health Science Center in Brooklyn from 1989 until 1998, when he joined University of Virginia faculty as the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics.
In 2007, Moreno joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as part of President Amy Gutmann’s Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Initiative, where he is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and a Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and of the History and Sociology of Science. He also holds a courtesy appointment in Penn’s Department of Philosophy, is a member of the Center for Neuroscience and Society, and is the interim chair of the program in Science, Technology, and Society.
As an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Moreno has served on and chaired a number of committees on bioethics, embryonic stem cell research, national defense research, and neuroscience. He is also a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, was a bioethics advisor for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is a Fellow of the Hastings Center and the New York Academy of Medicine.[1] . As a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Moreno is the Editor of Science Progress, an online journal focusing on progressive science and technology policy.
Moreno has received many awards and honors, among them a 1984-1985 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in cooperation with the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. He also received an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University in 1998 and the Benjamin Rush Medal from the College of William and Mary School of Law in 2008.[2]
Moreno has published more than 20 books, monographs, anthologies and textbooks and more than 300 papers, reviews and book chapters. He is also a member of several editorial boards.
In The Body Politic, Moreno elucidates the cultural, political and societal underpinnings of biotechnology by tracing its history from early America to the present culture wars of the “new biology.” The book considers the intersection of society and biotechnology in areas such as embryonic stem cell research, reproductive cloning, and synthetic biology, and demonstrates how biology and society have shaped each other into modern-day biopolitics.
Progress in Bioethics is a compilation of essays that explore the politicization of modern-day bioethics. Experts consider the fundamental values of progressivism and conservatism in bioethics, and situate bioethical issues within the nuances of politics and culture in the United States.
In Mind Wars, Moreno explores the scientific, ethical and policy issues surrounding military research and neuroscience projects in the United States, including experimentation with enhancement drugs for soldiers to the development of alleged deception detection and mind-control devices. The book sheds light on how these fields of inquiry have created a new era of conflict and national security, and introduces the concept of neurosecurity.
In the Wake of Terror presents essays on the complex moral questions that accompany societal concerns about terrorism and biological warfare. The essays, written by experts from the fields of medicine, health care policy, law, political science, history, philosophy, and theology, consider issues of civil liberties, medical experiments, and preparedness for future terrorist attacks.
Undue Risk is the first comprehensive study of the history and ethics of human experiments for national security purposes, from World War II to the first Gulf War and its aftermath. Topics covered include the Nazi doctors trial, the Japanese medical experiments, the human radiation experiments, and biological and chemical weapons testing.
In Deciding Together, Moreno discusses the process of moral consensus and its place in societal value systems from social, philosophical, and historical perspectives. In this work, he also constructs his concept of bioethical naturalism, a naturalistic meta-philosophy that explains moral consensus through psychology and the consensus process .