Rebecca Dresser, JD, MS

Professor Dresser discusses her early life, including the experience of losing her father to melanoma, her early educational interest in psychology and sociology, and her law school experience at Harvard in the late 1970s. Rebecca Dresser discussed her introduction to bioethics as a field, and subsequent career transitions, as she navigated differences between being tenured in medical or law schools and the challenges of balancing joint law and medical ethics positions. Dresser explains how she became involved in animal research ethics, her involvement with the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, and the regulatory challenges in this field. She emphasized the importance of including women in research and the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision on reproductive rights, noting the shift from privacy to liberty as a constitutional basis for such decisions. She recounts her service on the President’s Commission on Bioethics under George W. Bush and what that experience taught her about bioethics and politics.

Dresser discusses her cancer diagnosis and treatment journey as a patient and as a bioethicist. A few years after her remission, she gathered other bioethicists who had experienced cancer and edited a book, Malignant (2012), that emphasizes the value of personal knowledge in the field of bioethics.