Leon Kass, Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, to Deliver Hanify-Howland Lecture at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Leon R. Kass, one of the country’s leading scholars of issues in bioethics, who has served as Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics since his appointment by President George W. Bush in 2001, will deliver the 39th annual Hanify-Howland Memorial Lecture on March 21 at 8 p.m. in the Hogan Ballroom at the College of the Holy Cross. Dr. Kass is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago (on leave) and Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute. The lecture, titled "Science, Politics, and the Dilemmas of Bioethics," is free and open to the public.

The recipient of an M.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University, Dr. Kass has been professionally engaged for more than 30 years with the ethical and philosophical issues raised by recent biomedical advances.

Kass served as Executive Secretary of the Committee on the Life Sciences and Social Policy of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences from 1970 to 1972. The committee’s report, Assessing Biomedical Technologies, provided one of the first overviews of the emerging moral and social questions posed by biomedical advance.

Dr. Kass taught at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD, and served as Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Research Professor in Bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. He returned to teach at the University of Chicago in 1976.

Kass’s widely reprinted essays in biomedical ethics have dealt with issues raised by in vitro fertilization, cloning, genetic screening and genetic technology, organ transplantation, aging research, euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the moral nature of the medical profession.

Dr. Kass is the author of Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (Free Press, 1984); The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (University of Chicago Press, 1999); The Ethics of Human Cloning (American Enterprise Institute Press, 1998; with James Q. Wilson); Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000; with Amy A. Kass); Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (Encounter Books, 2002); and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003).

The annual Hanify-Howland lecture honors the late Edward F. Hanify, a 1904 graduate of Holy Cross and a Massachusetts Superior Court justice for 15 years, who died in 1954. The series was started by Hanify’s friend, the late Weston Howland of Milton, Mass., board chairman of Warwick Mills, Inc., who died in 1976.

Since 1965, the Hanify-Howland lecture series has brought high-profile speakers to Holy Cross who have found creative and powerful ways to serve the community. The aim of the lectures is to foster student debate and discussion of current issues, as well as inspire members of the community to commit their lives to public service.