News

Margaret Somerville among invited speakers at inaugural BEINGS global summit

Published: 2 February 2015

The Faculty was delighted to learn that Professor Margaret Somerville has been invited as a thought leader at the inaugural BEINGS Biotech and the Ethical Imagination Global Summit, which will take place May 17-19, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. Other luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Arthur Caplan, Steven A. Pinker and Michael J. Sandel are among the distinguished invited speakers at the summit.

Organized by Emory University Center for Ethics, this summit aims to be “a gathering of over 400 thought leaders from the world’s top 30 biotechnology producing countries to craft a set of global standards for cellular biotechnologies. Scientists, policy makers, ethicists, business leaders, NGO leaders, and creative thinkers from philosophy, religion, the arts, and the humanities will work together to reach consensus on an ethical vision that can provide countries, researchers, and the biotechnology sector with a set of standards to use as policy guidelines in the development of transformative biotechnologies.”

Professor Somerville holds professorships in both the Faculty of Law - where she holds the Samuel Gale Chair - and the Faculty of Medicine. She was the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. Professor Somerville plays an active role in the development of applied ethics, in particular, the study of wider ethical and legal aspects of medicine and science. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has received many honours and awards, including the Order of Australia and eight honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was the first recipient of the UNESCO’s Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science. In 2013, she was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for services to higher education. In 2014, she received the inaugural Jean Echlin Award for Ethics in Palliative Care.

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