Hastings Center 2023 Bioethics Founders' Award Celebration: Reflections on the Work of Norman Daniels and Rebecca Dresser

The Bioethics Founders’ Award is the Hastings Center’s most prestigious award. It recognizes excellence in scholarship and impact on health and science policymaking. This year’s honorees are Norman Daniels, MA, PhD, and Rebecca Dresser, MS, JD, both of whom have a long history of making distinguished contributions to the field.
Norman Daniels’s is being recognized for his contributions to the field which span fifty years of scholarship. His work set a precedent for expanding bioethics in medicine from the traditional focus on the doctor-patient relationship, informed consent, and other issues in clinical medicine. The many bioethics topics Professor Daniels has addressed include health technology assessment, access to organ transplantation in the United States, priority setting in health care, and HIV-related issues. Over the years he has worked with collaborators in a dozen countries on health sector reforms and reported some of the results in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. Over the past forty years of her still active career, Rebecca Dresser’s work has included a wide range of topics in health care and research, including end-of-life care, biomedical research, genetics, assisted reproduction and regulation of drugs. Her writings broke new ground in her approach to living wills and decision-making at the end of life. For many years she has been a regular contributor to the Hastings Center Report’s “At Law” column. Since 2016 she has been a Contributing Editor and Editorial Board Member of the Report. She served on the President’s Council of Bioethics from 2002 to 2009 during the presidency of George W. Bush, and since 2017 she has been a member of the Gene and Cell Therapy Data Safety and Monitoring Board of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky will lead a conversation about their scholarship and contributions to the field.