Higher seminar in Medical Law

In recent years some neuroscientists have begun using perfused, intact and metabolically-functioning ex-vivo brains (from both pigs and human beings) to do research on drugs for brain-diseases, on brain imaging, and on stroke. At the same time, transplant researchers have been testing stem-cell manufactured organs in the bodies of recently-deceased human beings. Disembodied brains and dead bodies are two very different kinds of novel research platforms, but they nonetheless raise certain parallel legal and ethical questions about the definition of death, and about who should have responsibility for "peri-mortem" research oversight.

Stephen R. Latham, JD (Harvard), PhD (Berkeley), is Director of Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He was Director of Ethics at the American Medical Association, and Secretary to the AMA's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, before entering academia full-time. Latham has served as a board member and as Secretary of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is author of over 150 publications on health law and bioethics, and currently serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Hastings Center Report and the American Journal of Bioethics. At Yale, he teaches Bioethics and Law, as well as chairs the social/behavioral Research Ethics Committee, co-chairs the Embryonic Stem Cell Research Committee, and serves on the Institutional Conflict of Interest Committee.

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Medical Law Group