Daniel I. Wikler | |
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Born | Daniel Isaac Wikler May 21, 1946 Lexington, Kentucky, U.S. |
Spouse(s) | Sarah Marchand; formerly Lynn McDonald |
Children | Ruth Wikler, Ben Wikler, Samuel Marchand |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Oberlin College (BA) University of California, Los Angeles (PhD) |
Academic work | |
School or tradition | Ethical philosophy |
Institutions | National Institute of Mental Health World Health Organization Harvard University |
Main interests |
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Daniel Isaac Wikler (born 1946) is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Director and a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health (PEH). His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transplant ethics, and ethical dilemmas arising in public health practice, and he teaches several courses each year. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution. [1]
Wikler is the son and third child of the late Abraham and Ada Fay Wikler. He was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, where he was graduated from Henry Clay High School.
Wikler earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1967. He served for two years (1968–1970) as Social Science Analyst in NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, in Washington, DC. He completed his doctorate in philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1976.
From 1972 to 1975, he was also awarded a Teaching Fellowship in the Department of Philosophy. He began his career working on natural language semantics at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and mathematics. [2]
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was professor of philosophy in the UW-Madison Department of Philosophy, professor in the Department of the History of Medicine's Program in Medical Ethics, and professor in the medical school of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, serving from 1975 to 2002.
From 1980 to 1981, he served on the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine in Washington, D.C., as Staff Philosopher for Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
He served as the first staff ethicist for the World Health Organization, and remains a consultant to several WHO programs. Prof. Wikler was co-founder (with Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse) and second president of the International Association of Bioethics and has served on the advisory boards of the Asian Bioethics Association and the Pan American Health Organization (AHO) Regional Program in Bioethics.
While at the World Health Organization, he instituted an international collaboration among philosophers and economists on ethical, methodological, and philosophical issues raised by WHO's work in measurement of the global burden of disease and in developing methods for improving health resource allocation.
Wikler writes, lectures, and advises in bioethics and professional ethics, both internationally and in Greater Boston, including at Harvard. During the summers, he also attends and teaches at a summer program at Fondation Brocher | Accueil outside Geneva. He is considered a world expert on ethics of the medical definition of death, specifically related to the dead-donor rule with regard to organ transplantation. [3]
He serves on numerous Harvard University and other professional committees and advises several student groups, including the Harvard Undergraduate Bioethics Society (HUBS), sponsor in March 2008 of the National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference.
Until 2010, Wikler was the co-director of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Program on Ethical Issues in Global Health Research (formerly Program on Ethical Issues in International Health Research, through June 2008), a program of both empirical and theoretical research on ethical issues in health research, particularly in developing countries. Versions of the course have been taught in over a dozen developing nations, including Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and UAE. The Program offered fellowships for scholars in developing countries and sponsored an intensive each year for an international clientele. A version of that program is now operated by Harvard Chan School's ORARC (which nicknames it 'eager' - EIGHR). [4]
Wikler is married to philosopher Sarah Marchand, and was formerly married to Lynn McDonald, [5] a professor of social work research and United Nations consultant. He has three children: two from his first marriage—his daughter, Ruth Wikler, [6] and eldest son, Ben Wikler, a political executive who has served as Chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin since 2019 and previously worked as a Senior Advisor at MoveOn; [7] and a son, Samuel Marchand, from his second marriage. [8]
In collaboration
Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health, including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions as environment, well-being and public health. Bioethics is concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, theology and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary care, other branches of medicine, ethical education in science, animal, and environmental ethics, and public health.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first graduate training program in population health, which was founded in 1913 and then became the Harvard School of Public Health in 1922.
The Hastings Center is an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute and think tank based in Garrison, New York.
Ulf Torbjörn Harald Tännsjö is a Swedish professor of philosophy and public intellectual. He has held a chair in Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University since 2002 and he is Affiliated Professor of Medical Ethics at Karolinska Institute. Tännsjö was associate professor of philosophy at Stockholm University from 1976 to 1993 and Research Fellow in Political Philosophy at the Swedish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences between 1993 and 1995. Thereafter, he was a professor of Practical Philosophy at Göteborg University 1995–2001.
The Centre for Human Bioethics is the previous name of a research and teaching centre at Monash University, based in the Faculty of Arts. The centre is now known as the Monash Bioethics Centre. It focusses on the branch of ethics known as bioethics, a field relating to biological science and medicine. It was founded in October 1980 by Professors Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, as the first centre in Australia devoted to bioethics, and one of the first in the world.
Allen Edward Buchanan is a moral, political and legal philosopher. As of 2022, he held multiple academic positions: Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University, Visiting Professor of the philosophy of international law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College, London, and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University.
Helga Kuhse is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist.
Jonathan D. Moreno is an American 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. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
The National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia was established in August 2007, with support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Institute of Mental Health and Addiction, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, the Canada Research Chairs program, the UBC Brain Research Centre and the UBC Institute of Mental Health. Co-founded by Judy Illes and Peter Reiner, the Core studies neuroethics, with particular focus on ethics in neurodegenerative disease and regenerative medicine, international and cross-cultural challenges in brain research, neuroimaging and ethics, the neuroethics of enhancement, and personalized medicine.
Dan W. Brock was an American philosopher, bioethicist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University and Brown University. He was the Frances Glessner Lee Professor Emeritus of Medical Ethics in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the former Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the Harvard Medical School, and former Director of the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health (PEH).
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Norman Daniels is an American political philosopher and philosopher of science, political theorist, ethicist, and bioethicist at Harvard University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before his career at Harvard, Daniels had built his career as a medical ethicist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and at Tufts University School of Medicine, also in Boston. He also developed the concept of accountability for reasonableness with James Sabin, an ethics framework used to challenge the healthcare resource allocation in the 1990s.
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Leonard Michael Fleck is an American philosophy professor and medical ethicist. He earned his Ph.D. from St. Louis University in 1975 and taught courses at St. Mary's College (Indiana) before going on to teach and at Michigan State University where he currently holds a dual appointment with the philosophy department and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. Fleck was also a member of Hillary Clinton's Task Force on Health Reform in 1993 and the staff ethicist for the Michigan governor's task force on access to health care in 1989-1990.
Ann M. Mongoven is an American philosophy professor and medical ethicist. She earned her Ph.D. in religious studies/ethics from the University of Virginia in 1996 and a M.P.H. from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2006. Mongoven taught courses at Indiana University/Bloomington before going on to teach at Michigan State University where she currently holds a dual appointment with the philosophy department and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. Mongoven is also a Michigan State University Lilly Teaching Fellow and was an ethics consultant for the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
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Christine I. Mitchell is an American filmmaker and bioethicist and until her retirement in September 2022, the executive director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).
Nir Eyal is a bioethicist and Henry Rutgers Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Center for Population–Level Bioethics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was formerly a bioethicist in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of the Harvard Medical School. He has long worked closely with Harvard bioethicist Daniel Wikler. Eyal's current visibility concerns his role in studying the ethics of human challenge trials in HIV, malaria, and coronavirus vaccine development. He has also written on 'bystander risks' during pandemics and infectious diseases and contract tracing during ebola.
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