Brad Gray, PhD

Brad Gray shares his upbringing on a ranch in the Oklahoma panhandle and his education at Oklahoma State University and Yale University. He describes his role in early bioethics topics such as human subjects research, informed consent, coercion in prisoner research, and the significance of empirical research in bioethics. Gray discusses his career transition from the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to being a study director at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in the early 1980s. His work at IOM included reports on medical peer review data, civil rights and access to healthcare, prescription drug package inserts, utilization management, and implications of for-profit healthcare, among others. Gray highlights the variability in IRB operations and the challenges in creating a human subjects protection accreditation program. He discusses his collaboration with Mark Schlesinger at Yale when they worked on studies about nonprofit and for-profit healthcare systems. He describes his thirteen years as editor of The Milbank Quarterly, his insights into the likelihood of universal healthcare in the United States, and projects he has worked on with scholars and physicians. The interview ends with a discussion of how he came to be a collector of rare books, most of which are now at the Beineke Rare Book Library at Yale University.