Arthur Caplan

Arthur Caplan.

Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., is the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor, and head of the Division of Medical Ethics, at New York University, Langone Medical Center, in New York City. Prior to coming to NYU he was the Sidney D Caplan Professor of Bioethics, and the Emmanuel and Robert Hart director of the Center for Bioethics, at the University of Pennsylvania. Caplan has also taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. He was the Associate Director of the Hastings Center from 1984-1987. Born in Boston, Caplan did his undergraduate work at Brandeis University where he majored in philosophy. He did his graduate work at Columbia University, where he received a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science.[1]

While at the University of Pennsylvania, he became the first bioethicist sued for his professional role as a result of his involvement in a gene therapy trial that resulted in the death of research subject Jesse Gelsinger. The suit was subsequently dismissed by the trial court as without merit

Caplan secured the first apology for the Tuskegee Study from Lewis Sullivan M.D., then secretary of HHS, in 1991.[2] He worked with William Seidelman, M.D., and others, to secure, in 2012, an apology from the German Medical Association for the role of German physicians in the Holocaust.[3]

Caplan has made many contributions to public policy including: helping to found the National Marrow Donor Program, creating the policy of required request in cadaver organ donation adopted throughout the USA, helping to create the system for distributing organs in the USA, and advising on the content of the National Organ Transplant Act, rules governing living organ donation, and legislation and regulation in many other areas of health care including blood safety and compassionate use.

Academic work

Caplan is the author, or editor, of thirty-two books, and of 600 papers in peer-reviewed journals of medicine, science, philosophy, bioethics, and health policy.

He has served on a number of national, and international, committees including: as the Chair National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Working Group, the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning, the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the Department of Health and Human Services on Blood Safety and Availability, a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses, the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy, the ethics committee of the American Society of Gene Therapy, and the special advisory panel to the National Institute of Mental Health on human experimentation on vulnerable subjects. He has consulted with many corporations, not-for-profit organizations and consumer organizations. He is a member of the board of directors of The Keystone Center, the National Center for Policy Research on Women and Families, Octagon, The Franklin Institute, Iron Disorders Foundation and the National Disease Research Interchange. He chaired the advisory committee on bioethics at Glaxo from 2005–8. He was the co-director of a United Nations/Council of Europe Study on organ trafficking. He is an adviser to DARPA on synthetic biology.

He is a regular contributor to WebMD/Medscape. He is a regular commentator on WGBH radio Boston on the noontime news show and WMNF Tampa. He is a frequent guest and commentator on various other media outlets, discussing public health issues like obesity.,[4] Ebola, Zika and vaccines

He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, the New York Academy of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also on the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Awards and honors

Caplan is the recipient of many awards and honors including the McGovern Medal of the American Medical Writers Association and the Franklin Award from the City of Philadelphia. He was a person of the Year 2001 from USA Today, one of the fifty most influential people in American health care by Modern Health Care magazine, one of the ten most influential people in America in biotechnology by the National Journal and one of the ten most influential people in the ethics of biotechnology by the editors of Nature Biotechnology.[5] He holds seven honorary degrees from colleges and medical schools.[5] Discover magazine in December, 2008 named him one of the ten most influential people in science. In 2014 he was given the public service award of the National Science Board/National Science Foundation [6]

Organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China

In 2012 Caplan stated,

"Look, I think you can make the connections that...they are using prisoners, and they need prisoners who are relatively healthy, they need prisoners who are relatively younger. It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination that some Falun Gong [practitioners] are going to be among those who are going to be killed for parts. It just follows, because remember you can't take very old people as sources of organs and you can't take people who are very sick. They, Falun Gong, are in part younger, and by lifestyle, healthier. I would be astounded if they weren't using some of those prisoners as sources of organs."[7]

Bibliography

According to Google Scholar Caplan's publications have an H-index of 47 and an I10-index of 87 since 2009

Books

Caplan is the editor or author of 32 books including:[8]

   Replacement Parts Replacement Parts: The Ethics of Procuring and Replacing Organs in Humans (Georgetown, 2015)
   http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/replacement-parts

Articles

Personal life

Caplan comes from a Jewish family, which he describes as "Workmen's Circle, Zionist, and secular."[10] He is married and has one son who is an attorney

References

External links

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