Speaker biographies

Mark Cherry is the Dr. Patricia A. Hayes Professor in Applied Ethics and an associate professor of philosophy at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. His most recent book is Kidney for Sale by Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Market (Georgetown University Press, 2005). He is senior associate editor of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, senior associate editor of the journal Christian Bioethics, editor in chief of the journal HealthCare Ethics Committee Forum, and series editor of The Annals of Bioethics. He is editor or coeditor of Persons and Their Bodies: Rights, Responsibilities, Relationships (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), Allocating Scarce Medical Resources: Roman Catholic Perspectives (Georgetown University Press, 2002), Religious Perspectives in Bioethics (Taylor and Francis, 2004), Regional Perspectives in Bioethics (Swets and Zeitlinger, 2003), Natural Law and the Possibility of a Global Bioethics (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), and The Death of Metaphysics; The Death of Culture (Springer, 2005). He has also written numerous articles, book chapters, and other publications.

Lloyd Cohen has published scholarship on a variety of applications of economics to law, including a market in transplant organs, marriage and divorce, wrongful death, tender offers, and free riders and holdouts. Before joining the faculty of George Mason University in 1993, he taught law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and was a John M. Olin research fellow at the University of Chicago. Professor Cohen has served as a special counsel to the U.S. International Trade Commission and as a law clerk to Judge Gerald B. Tjoflat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Before attending law school, he was an economics professor. Professor Cohen teaches wills, trusts, and estates; statistics for lawyers; and several courses in applied economics.

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is a senior fellow at AEI and is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Speaker Gingrich is a member of the Terrorism Task Force for the Council on Foreign Relations and the U.S. Commission on National Security, an advisory board member of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a member of the Defense Policy Board. Gingrich also served as co-chair, along with former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, of the Task Force on U.N. Reform created by Congress in December 2004. The Task Force delivered its report entitled American Interests and U.N. Reform to Congress last June. Mr. Gingrich is also an editorial board member of the Johns Hopkins University Journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism and a news and political analyst for the Fox News Channel. He is a regular contributor to the Church Report, writes a weekly e-letter for Human Events, and has a daily national radio commentary called Winning the Future with Newt Gingrich. He is the author of nine books and novels, including the New York Times bestseller Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America, and most recently, Never Call Retreat. Lee and Grant: The Final Victory, the third and final novel in his trilogy about the Civil War.

Michele Goodwin is the Wicklander Chair in Ethics (2004–2006) and a professor of law at DePaul College of Law. She currently directs the top-ranked Health Law Institute as well as the Center for the Study of Race & Bioethics. In 2005, she received the Excellence in Scholarship Award and in 2006 received the prestigious Humanities Award from DePaul University. She has also been named Woman of the Year by the Urban League, and Pioneering Woman by the Historical Society of Chicago. She is a bioethicist who researches tort and property theories in the body and biotechnology. She regularly lectures internationally on bioethics and biotechnology topics such as assisted reproductive technologies, mental health, stem cell manipulation, and organ transplantation, and has been invited to provide keynote lectures and workshops in South Korea, Finland, Austria, Australia, South Africa, Italy, England, Ireland, and a host of other nations. Her recent book, Black Markets: The Supply & Demand of Body Parts, published by Cambridge University Press this year, builds upon a career of scholarship exploring causes for organ shortages and methods to remedy that crisis. Professor Goodwin's scholarship has been cited by the Seventh Circuit, 60 Minutes, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Wisconsin State Journal, the Milwaukee Journal, and other media venues. She is a member of the executive board of the American Association of Law Schools section on law and medicine, and is a fellow of the Illinois Institute of Medicine.

Benjamin Hippen, M.D., is a nephrologist specializing in renal transplantation at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is an at-large member of the ethics committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, for which he serves as chair of a subcommittees considering presumed consent policies and financial incentives for organ procurement. Dr. Hippen also serves as a member of the Carolinas Medical Center Ethics Committee. Dr. Hippen is primarily occupied with the clinical care of kidney transplant recipients, but the caring for patients with chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease remains integral to his practice. Experiences from his clinical practice animate his research interests, which are currently focused on identifying solutions to the disparity between the demand for and supply of organs for transplantation. In this vein, he is most recently the author of, “In Defense of a Regulated Market in Human Organs from Living Vendors,” an article which appeared in the December 2005 issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. In that article, Hippen reviews and refutes a number of common objections to a regulated organ market, and argues that such a market is morally distinguishable from the current practice of underground organ trafficking. He argues in favor of a series of side constraints on a regulated organ market, including the priority of safe practices, transparency, institutional integrity, and the operation under a rule of law. Dr. Hippen holds board certifications in internal medicine and nephrology. He serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and is a reviewer for the American Journal of Transplantation.

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Future and Its Enemies (Free Press, 1998) and The Substance of Style (HarperCollins, 2003), and is a contributing editor for The Atlantic, where she writes a column on commerce and culture. She is also a columnist for Forbes, and from 2000 to 2006 was an economics columnist for the New York Times business section. She edited Reason magazine from 1989 to 2000.

Dr. Sally Satel is a resident scholar at AEI and the staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She serves on the advisory committee of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Satel was an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993. From 1993 to 1994 she was a policy fellow with the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. She has written widely in academic journals on topics in psychiatry and medicine, and has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in numerous magazines and journals. Dr. Satel is author of Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (AEI Press, 1999) and PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001), and is coauthor, with Christina Hoff Sommers, of One Nation under Therapy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

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