Shapiro To Lecture On Biomedicine, Ethics, And Public Policy

Harold T. Shapiro will speak on “Science, Anxiety, and Meaning: Biomedicine Encounters Ethics and Public Policy” on February 24 at 5:00 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study. The talk is sponsored by the Institute’s Program in Theoretical Biology.

Shapiro, who was President of Princeton University from 1988 to 2001, is currently professor of economics and public affairs in the University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. While President, he chaired the National Bioethics Advisory Commission from 1996 to 2001, during which time the Commission issued six major reports.

He came to Princeton from the University of Michigan, where he served on the faculty for 24 years as professor of economics and public policy, and as President and Chair of the Board of Regents from 1980 to 1988. At Michigan, he was also research scientist at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, and at the Institute of Public Policy Studies.

A native of Montreal, Shapiro received his bachelor’s degree from McGill University in 1956. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at Princeton in 1964.

His fields of special interest include econometrics, mathematical economics, science policy, the evolution of higher education as a social institution, and, more recently, bioethics.

From 1990 to 1992 Shapiro was member and vice-chair of the first President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Shapiro is a trustee of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (where he chairs the board); serves as a director of the Dow Chemical Company, HCA, the Hastings Center, and DeVry, Inc.; and is a member of the Board of Overseers of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Other board memberships include the American Jewish Committee and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

He holds honorary degrees from a number of universities, including the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, Yale University, Yeshiva University, and the University of Edinburgh.

An elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Shapiro is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Extensive services to education include membership on many boards and committees, including the N.J. Commission on Science and Technology, the Interlochen Center for the Arts, the American Council on Education, the Educational Testing Service, the NCAA, the Research Libraries Group, and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education.

Along with William G. Bowen, his predecessor as president of Princeton, Shapiro edited Universities and Their Leadership (1998), a compilation of papers presented at Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Conference on Higher Education. Among Shapiro’s recent publications are articles in Science; the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal; the Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal, and Policy Issues in Biotechnology; and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Shapiro’s talk is free and open to the public. For further information, call (609) 734-8118.