We’ll share the Zoom link for the talk on October 17.
By now society has become familiar with the promised benefits and potential pitfalls of the artificial intelligence revolution. Not since the early years of genetic engineering has a technology captured our imagination and fears so quickly. But AI has done something else – it has dragged bioethics into unfamiliar territory: this is because AI does not fit comfortably under one category of analysis (e.g., research, policy, technology development, public health) nor is even limited to the health sector, but touches on every sector of society including trade policy, national security, banking, and immigration, among others. This is a good thing, as it calls on bioethics to take stock of how it can (and should) engage in future-altering policy debates.
About the speaker
ormer President and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) and the former director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics.
From 2016-2023, Dr. Meslin was President and CEO of the CCA, an organization undertaking expert assessments for the government of Canada and other sponsors on society’s most pressing policy issues including climate change, artificial intelligence, health data, transportation, Arctic research, Indigenous affairs, and international science and technology policy.
Dr. Meslin came to the CCA from Indiana University (IU), where he was the Founding Director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics for 15 years, Associate Dean for Bioethics in the IU School of Medicine, and Professor of Medicine, of Medical & Molecular Genetics, of Bioethics and Law, of Public Health, and of Philosophy. In 2012 Dr. Meslin was appointed IU’s first endowed Professor of Bioethics.
Dr. Meslin has held academic positions at the University of Oxford, as Professor-at-Large at the University of Western Australia, and as the Pierre de Fermat Chaire d’Excellence at the Université de Toulouse.
Before Indiana University, he was Bioethics Research Director of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications program at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, and then Executive Director of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission appointed by President Bill Clinton.
Dr. Meslin has more than 200 published articles and book chapters on various topics in bioethics and science policy. He has been an advisor and served on committees of the World Health Organization, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, Genome Canada, OECD, UNESCO and the UK Biobank.