Baruch Brody is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University and the Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics at Baylor College of Medicine. He has been associated with Rice since 1975 and served as the Chair of its Philosophy Department from 1975 to 1982. He has been associated with Baylor College of Medicine since 1982 and served as the founding director of its Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy from 1982-2012. During the period 1985-2012, he also served as the Director of the Ethics Program at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas.
Dr Brody received his B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1962. The college awarded him its Distinguished Alumnus award in 1991. He studied at Oxford University as a Fulbright Fellow in 1965-66 and was awarded a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1967.
In recognition of his research efforts, Dr Brody was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences in 2001 and was awarded Baylor’s highest research honor, the Michael E DeBakey Research Award, in 2002. He presented the result of his research both in bioethics and in philosophy in six original books and 105 peer-reviewed articles. The books are: Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life (MIT Press: 1975), Identity and Essence (Princeton University Press: 1980), Life and Death Decision Making (Oxford University Press: 1988), Ethical Issues in Drug Testing, Approval and Pricing (Oxford University Press, 1995), The Ethics of Biomedical Research: An International Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Taking Issue (Georgetown University Press: 2004). He also authored and/or edited sixteen texts or reference books, 43 book chapters and 21 book reviews in major journals. Finally, his research was supported by six major grants from federal agencies (NIH, NASA and VA) and grants from the Ford Foundation and the Exxon Educational Foundation.
Dr Brody served on the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (the RAC) at the N.I.H., co-chairing its subcommittee on informed consent, and on the DSMB for the NIH’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group (the committee which monitored the major NIH funded studies related to AIDS therapy). He was a member of the Ethics Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and chaired many bioethics policy task forces for NASA. He continues to serve as a member of Greenwall Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Program Advisory Board, which selects outstanding junior scholars in Bioethics to receive major research support for three years. He was the president of the Society for Health and Human Values and was a member of the board of the American Philosophical Association.
Dr Brody developed a full ethics program for the Methodist Hospital. The program developed policies on ethical issues, educated the staff about these issues and policies and provided an active 24 x 7 consult program. In the last year of his leadership, that program was expanded to four other hospitals which are part of the Methodist Hospital System.
philosophy, bioethics, medical ethics, Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, abortion,life and death decision making, research ethics, Houston futility policy, intellectual property and biotechnology, ethics of surgical trials