GEM Anscombe
Daniel
Berrigan
Steven E
Calvin
Noam
Chomsky
Bryan E Dowd
Robert P George
Hymie
Gordon
(Eulogy
for H. Gordon)
Jasper
Hopkins
Konald A
Prem
Philip J Regal
David
Weissbrodt
Kirk C. Allison, BA, BS, MA, PhD, EMT, Cand. MS
Dr. Allison was born in Wichita, Kansas, and
received his bachelor’s of science degree in computer science and a
bachelor of arts in German from the University of Kansas (with study of
Informatik at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität
Erlangen-Nürnberg). He completed a master’s degree with honors in
Germanic Languages and Literatures also from the University of Kansas.
In 1987 he received a Fulbright grant to the
Ludwig-Maximillian-Universität München where he pursued
studies in German literature, theology (Institut für Systematische
Theologie; Institut für Fundamentaltheologie und Ökumene),
and philosophy of science (Institut für Statistik und
Wissenschaftstheorie, Seminar für Philosophie, Logik und
Wissenschaftstheorie). He also attended lectures in emergency medicine
(taking advantage of the Hörerfreiheit of the German
university). In 1988 he was a Hans Martin Schleyer Stiftung e.V.
Seminar Stipendiat. In Fall of 1988 he returned stateside to pursue a
Ph.D. in Germanic Studies with a minor in Comparative Literature at the
University of Minnesota, including study at the Ruhr-Universität
Bochum in 1990. In 1992 he completed an Emergency Medical Technician
certification. In 1995 he was a translator/analyst in the Department of
Rhetoric for the history of scientific writing (project of Gross,
Harmon, and Reidy, Communicating Science: The Scientific Article
from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Oxford UP, 2002).
In
1996-97, while Gastlektor at the Universität Salzburg, he
conducted a colloquium at Salzburg College on the topic of historical
consciousness. His dissertation research at the Deutches
Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany, concerned physician-poet
Gottfried Benn (1886-1956). The project investigated the social location and discourse horizon
of Benn’s medical specialties (military medicine, psychiatry,
pathology, dermatology-venerology, and epidemiology) in relation to his
literature and ethics (relation to the Hippocratic ethical tradition
and confluence of eugenics, aesthetics, and politics). In 1999 background
phenomenological investigations followed at the University of Minnesota
concerning physician training, augmented through a Visiting Scholar
Preceptorship at the Office of Medical Examiner, Hennepin County,
Minnesota, in 2000.
Having served on
the colloquium committee of the Program in Human Rights and Medicine
from 1997-1999 and completing the dissertation (Gottfried Benn’s
Medical Exotics: Proximities in Literature, the Body and Ethos, 2000,
739 p.), he assumed the duties of Associate Director in July of 2000.
He was a consultant for the Human Rights Library study guide “The Right
to Means for Adequate Health,” made available in English and French in
2003. Recent activities include collaboration on a health insurance
disparity project (Covering Kids and Families, Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation Special Solicitation Grant) and a policy recommendation
review for the Minneapolis Department of Health & Family Support
and the Hennepin County Human Services & Public Health Department
in the context of the state mandated Eliminating Health
Disparities Initiative (MS 145.928) in 2004. In 2005 Dr. Allison
presented testimony for state legislative committees regarding
“Genomics, Ethics and the Public Representation of Science” and “Stem Cell Research Policy: Is Ethics or
Science Primary?” His publications discuss science and ideology,
interdisciplinarity, and the concept of human dignity in relation to
disability. He has also published research in applied linguistics and
translations of poetry by Georg Trakl. Current projects include a health services
research and policy MS (School of Public Health) and translation of a
commission document concerning euthanasia in the Netherlands.
GEM Anscombe, BA, LLD
Professor GEM Anscombe, LLD, co-founder of the Program in Human Rights
and Medicine and one of the most eminent philosophers in the
English-speaking world (writing in the New Republic,
J.M.Cameron called her: "simply the most distinguished, intellectually
formidable, original, and troublesome philosopher in sight"). The
Prince of Liechtenstein endowed a chair in philosophy at the
Internationale Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum in
Liechtenstein and invited Dr. Anscombe to become the chair's first
occupant and to give the inaugural lecture for the chair on the 26th of
October, 1995. Her lecture, titled "Die Wahrheit Thun" (To Do the
Truth), examined the idea of "doing the truth," which has its earliest
known expression in the 1st Epistle of St. John (I, vi). Dr. Anscombe
was Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Cambridge University, an
Honorary Fellow of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, a Fellow of Somerville
College, Oxford, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, and a member of the British Academy. She taught at Somerville
College, Oxford, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago,
the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, and Johns
Hopkins University. Among the many honors and awards she has received
are the Ehrenkreuz Pro Litteris et Artibus (Austria, 1978), the
Forschungspries, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (1983), and an
Honorary Doctorate from Notre Dame University (1986). During academic
year 1987-88, she was President of The Aristotelian Society. Professor
Anscombe has given endowed lectures at Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge,
London, Harvard, Princeton, Minnesota, Johns Hopkins, Brown, UCLA,
Columbia, Berkeley and other universities. Her translations of the
writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein are widely viewed as important
contributions to the study of his thought. (In addition to carrying out
the translation of Philosophical Investigations, the only book
by Wittgenstein published with his permission. As Wittgenstein's
literary executor, she translated and co-edited his posthumous works.)
Her original contributions to philosophy include the celebrated book Intention
(1957) which launched the branch of philosophy known as "action
theory," An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959), Three
Philosophers (with P.T. Geach, 1961), and a three volume edition of
her Collected Papers (Blackwell, 1981) a number of which (e.g.,
"The Intentionality of Sensation," "On Brute Facts," "Mr. Truman's
Degree," "What's Wrong With Modern Moral Philosophy?," "The First
Person," and "The Source of the Authority of the State") are widely
regarded as classics of twentieth century philosophy. Her more recent
contributions, apart from forthcoming Inaugural Lecture in
Liechtenstein, include her penetrating chapter on "Murder and the
Morality of Euthanasia," in Euthanasia, Clinical Practice, and the
Law, (Luke Gormally, ed.) Linacre Centre, 1994. Her death in
January of 2001 left bereft not only the world of philosophy, but also
the world at large.
Daniel Berrigan, SJ
Daniel Berrigan, SJ, member of the Advisory Board of the Program in
Human Rights and Medicine, celebrated
poet, and radical advocate of human rights has, in addition to his
anti-war efforts, long worked with, and on behalf of, various persons
at risk of unjust treatment under our health care system, especially
cancer patients and persons with AIDS.
Steven E Calvin, BS, MD
Steven E. Calvin, MD, Chair of the Program in Human Rights and
Medicine, is board certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology and in the
subspecialty of Maternal-Fetal Medicine. He was born in Worthington,
Minnesota in 1954 and earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry at
Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1980 he was awarded an M.D.
degree by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
After completing a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the
University of Minnesota and fulfilling a National Health Service Corps
scholarship commitment at the El Rio Neighborhood Health Center in
Tucson, he carried out a course of studies under a maternal-fetal
medicine fellowship at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Calvin is a practicing perinatologist with a full time teaching position in the University of Minnesota's Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women's Health. He also teaches a graduate level course in medical ethics in the University of Minnesota's Department of Philosophy in collaboration with Jasper Hopkins. He has spoken at ethics conferences and scientific conferences around the country and, in the Spring of 1996, in response to an invitation from Rep. Henry Hyde, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on advances in perinatal medicine since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. His research interests are in the area of pregnancy toxemia and the ethical analysis of current perinatal practice. In 2000 he was invited to present on the ethical challenges of maternal-fetal medicine practice in the United States at the International Forum on Medical Ethics in Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Calvin is also a speaker and commentator on the ethics of stem cell research with a research interest in placental stem cells. His recent basic research, however, has predominantly concerned the mechanical characteristics of human chorioamnion and amnion (coathoring a paper receiving the Trophy Prize of the Mechanical Research Society for the 2004 symposium on mechanical properties of bioinspired and biological materials’).
In his other life, Dr. Calvin is a promoter of sustainable agriculture and grazing methods. (On the relationship between culture and agriculture, he recommends reading agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry.) He and his wife Cindy have been married now for 25 years and have three children.
Noam Chomsky, PhD
Noam Chomsky, PhD, member of the Program in Human Rights and Medicine
Advisory Board, is an internationally renowned linguist, philosopher,
political analyst, and outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy and the
mass media. A clue to his distinction and influence is provided by an
interesting fact. According to the 1993 Arts and Humanities Citation
Index, in the years 1980 through 1992, Noam Chomsky was cited as a
source in arts and humanities journals and literature more often than
any living scholar. Indeed, during the period studied, only seven
writers in all of human history were cited more frequently than Noam
Chomsky. (The seven included Shakespeare, Freud, Marx, the Bible, and
Plato.) A clue to his modesty is provide by a recent episode. The fact
just reported about the frequency with which his writings are cited was
mentioned as he was being introduced at a public lecture at the
University of Minnesota sponsored by the Program in Human Rights and
Medicine. As he took the microphone, Chomsky said, with a smile, to the
audience: "You have to be careful about statistics like the one just
mentioned. The statistic doesn't tell you what those writers are saying
about me."
Related Links:
Chomsky's
Home Page
The
Minimalist Program
The Noam Chomsky Archive
Intellectual
Trading Cards
Mary K Clifford, RN,
BA
Mary K Clifford, RN, BA, is an associate of the Program in Human Rights
and Medicine, a health professional with a number of years experience
as a registered nurse at the University of Minnesota Hospital in an
adult cardiac-pulmonary medical-surgical unit, and an extensive
background in the area of continuing medical and nursing education in
the field of medical ethics. Her nursing background also includes
practice at a small rural hospital in northeastern Iowa. Ms. Clifford
earned a bachelor's degree in Theater Arts at the College of St. Teresa
and an Associate Degree in nursing at Austin Community College. She has
lectured on topics in biomedical ethics before audiences at colleges,
universities, churches, and hospitals. Active with the Program in Human
Rights and Medicine almost from its very beginning, she has organized,
overseen, and served as an instructor in a number of seminars,
conferences, and courses in continuing medical education. Ms. Clifford
assumed her position as Associate Director of the Program in the
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in July of 1996 and served in
this capacity until 2000. In addition to providing nursing care, she
provides technical services in an oncology laboratory.
John M Dolan, BA, PhD
John M Dolan, BA, PhD, is co-founder of the Program in Human Rights and
Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women's
Health at the University of Minnesota and Morse Alumni Distinguished
Teaching Professor of Philosophy at that university. He earned a
bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy at Brooklyn College
(while working full-time for three years on the Brooklyn waterfront as
a member of the International Longshoreman's Union). He earned a
doctorate in philosophy at Stanford University with a dissertation
titled "Translation and Meaning: An Examination of Quine's
Translational Indeterminacy Hypothesis." Before joining the faculty of
the University of Minnesota, Professor Dolan held research and teaching
positions (teaching mathematics, computer science, and philosophy and
conducting research in computational linguistics, meteorology, and
philosophy) at Brooklyn College, MIT, the University of Chicago, the
Rockefeller University, and Swarthmore College. Dr. Dolan served for
three years as associate editor of the MIT journal Computational
Linguistics and Mechanical Translation and for seven years as
Co-Editor of The Thoreau Quarterly. He is a member of the American
Philosophical Association and is one of the few non-Japanese scholars
in the Thoreau Society of Japan. He has taught medical ethics at the
Mayo Medical School and has taught and served as course director for
courses in medical ethics at the Medical School of the University of
Minnesota. Until his medical retirement, he taught a course in medical
ethics in the University of Minnesota's law school. His publications
include a logic book, Inference and Imagination (Archimedean
Point Press, 1994) and a number of articles on medical ethics,
philosophy of language, moral philosophy, media studies, pedagogy, and
epistemology in various medical, legal, and other scholarly journals.
He has been an invited lecturer at medical schools, hospitals,
colleges, universities, and scholarly conferences throughout the United
States, including Abbot Northwestern Hospital, Brandeis University, the
medical school of the University of California, Davis, the philosophy
department of the University of California, Davis, the University of
California, Sonoma, the University of Chicago, the City University of
New York, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, Indiana
University, the University of Maryland, the medical school of the Mayo
Clinic, MIT, the medical school of New York University, the philosophy
department of New York University, St Olaf College, the University of
St. Thomas, the medical school of Stanford University, the philosophy
department of Stanford University, the University of Southern
California, Swarthmore College, and the University of Washington. The
academic appointment in which he takes most pride is the position he
held as Headmaster of Kenwood Academy, the home school he and his wife
conducted for their children from 1975 until 1993.
Bryan Dowd joined the Program in Human Rights and Medicine as Co-Chair in 2002. Professor Dowd is a health economist with a PhD in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Pennsylvania (1982), an MS in Urban Administration from Georgia State (1976), and BA in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1972). He was named Mayo Professor of Public Health in 2002. He is also Director of Graduate Programs in Health Services Research and Policy in the School of Public Health. His work focuses on markets for health insurance and health care services, and the application of econometric methods to health services research problems. His recent research includes studies of insurance theory, causal modeling, health plan choice, tax policy, the cost-impact of a disability prevention program, risk adjustment, and equity in health care (access and financing). He has published over 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Additional interests include the relationship between scientific authority, accountability, and social values; ethical prescription and positive description; research ethics and informed consent; and the relationship between ‘reason’ and ‘faith.’
Robert P George, PhD, JD
Robert P. George is
Cyrus Hall McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton
University, where he teaches in the areas of philosophy of law, civil
rights and liberties, and American constitutional law and theory. A
graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, Professor George
holds a doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford University. He was
elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore and received a Knox Fellowship
from Harvard for advanced study in law and philosophy at Oxford. He is
author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality
(1993) and In Defense of Natural Law (1999), and editor of Natural
Law, Liberalism, and Morality (1996), The Autonomy of Law:
Essays on Legal Positivism (1996), and Natural Law Theory:
Contemporary Essays (1992), all published by Oxford University
Press. In 2001 he published The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion
and Morality in Crisis – a topic on which he lectured in 2005 at
the University of Minnesota Law School.
His articles and review essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Review of Politics, the Review of Metaphysics, Law and Philosophy, and the American Journal of Jurisprudence. Professor George is general editor of New Forum Books, a Princeton University Press series of books on law, culture, and politics. He serves on the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Editorial Advisory Board of First Things, and the Board of Consulting Editors of Academic Questions. He is a member of the Boards of Directors of the Philosophy Education Society, the National Association of Scholars, and the Institute for American Values. He recently completed a six-year term as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the 1990 "Justice Tom C. Clark Award." His other honors include an American Bar Association "Silver Gavel Award" (1991) and the Federalist Society's "Paul Bator Award" (1994). He is listed on the Templeton Foundation's Honor Roll of Outstanding Professors. In addition to his academic work, Robert George is Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee. In 1994, he was counsel of record to Mother Teresa of Calcutta in her amicus curiae brief asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling in Roe v. Wade.
In 2002 Professor George was appointed to the President’s Council on Bioethics
Hymie Gordon, BSci, BM, BSurg, MD, FRCP
Hymie
Gordon, MD, FRCP, was co-founder and Co-Chair of the Program in Human
Rights and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, Professor Emeritus
of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and
founder and director of the Mayo Clinic's world renowned program in
medical genetics. Born in the Union of South Africa on 20 September
1926, he attended the University of Cape Town, where he earned the
degree of Bachelor of Sciences in medical sciences in 1946, the degrees
of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1950 and the degree
of Doctor of Medicine in 1958. The subject of his doctoral thesis was:
"The Regulation of the Human Serum-Cholesterol Level."
He was an intern in the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1951, and in 1952 he was resident medical officer in the Stanger Government Hospital in Natal. He was medical registrar in the Addington Hospital in Durban, South Africa, from late 1952 to 1955. In 1955 and in 1956, he was senior medical registrar in the Groote Schuur Hospital, and from 1956 to 1958, he was clinical research bursar at the University of Cape Town. In 1958 and 1959 he was a fellow of the Forman Foundation and served as research associate in the Department of Cardiology at the Postgraduate Medical School and the Hammersmith Hospital in London, England. From 1959 to 1961, he was assistant physician in medicine and instructor in biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (in 1960 as an Eli Lilly foundation Fellow).
In 1961, he returned to South Africa, where he became senior lecturer in the Department of Medicine of the University of Cape Town and senior physician in the Groote Schuur Hospital. He established a genetics teaching and research program at the University of Cape Town and a Comprehensive Care Clinic at the Groote Schuur Hospital. He was the medical officer of the Students' Health and Welfare Centres Organization, Founder and Chairman of the Medical History Club, and President of the University Cricket Club.
He joined the Mayo Clinic on the 1st of May, 1969, and was charged with the task of developing a program in medical genetics. In January of 1972, he became the first chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics and the first Professor of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Medical School. In 1988, with G.E.M. Anscombe and John M Dolan, he founded the Program in Human Rights and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. With John M Dolan, from that date, he served as Co-Chair of the Program until his death.
He wrote numerous articles and contributed to numerous publications on clinical medicine, biochemistry, epidemiology, genetics, and medical history. He was often an invited lecturer at the leading centers of learning around the planet, including the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Padua, the Sorbonne in Paris, the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and most of the other London Medical Schools, and the University of Oxford. He was the David Hsia lecturer at Loyola Medical School, the Morris Fishbein Lecturer at the University of Chicago, the Kelly lecturer at Albany Medical School, the McKenzie Professor at the University of Edmonton, and the Benedict Lecturer at the American Academy of Ophthalmologists and Otorhinolaryngologists.
He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Royal Society of Medicine, and the British Interplanetary Society; and he was a member of the Genetical Society of Great Britain. After emigrating to the United States of America in 1969, he was a member of the American society for Human Genetics, the American Association for the History of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of the Sigma-Xi. He served on the editorial boards of Postgraduate Medicine and of the American Journal of Medical Genetics. He was a member of the Medical Advisory Boards of the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases and of Human Life International. He was certified in Clinical Genetics by the American Board of Medical Genetics.
Dr. Gordon retired from Clinical practice in 1989 and, in the years
afterward, devoted himself to three principal pursuits. First, he
completed several research projects in genetics. Second, as Consultant
in the History of Medicine, he composed and delivered a vast,
sixty-lecture, three year lecture series titled, "History for
Physicians," which covered illness, disease, medicine, and human
culture from Biblical times up through the Human Genome Project. Third,
as Co-Chair of the Program in Human Rights and Medicine, he spent
thousands of hours planning, participating in, and leading seminars,
lecture series, and other educational programs. A high point of his
work with the Program in Human Rights and Medicine during those years
was a highly successful six-lecture series of lectures he delivered at
the University of Minnesota, in academic year 1993-94, titled "The Task
of Medicine: A Rich Past and an Open Future." Throughout the years
following his retirement from clinical practice, he continued his
life-long habit of travel to the centers of learning and art in Europe,
Israel, and his native South Africa. Dr. Gordon died during a visit to
South Africa, on the 5th of February in 1995.
Return to
top of page
Eulogy for
Hymie Gordon, MD
(Delivered by John M. Dolan on 20 September 1995 at a memorial service
held at the University of Minnesota on what would have been Dr.
Gordon's 69th birthday. An earlier version of this eulogy was read by
the author at a memorial service at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
Minnesota, on 23 March 1995)
It is a curious circumstance that I, the son of Christian parents, often think of a passage from The Koran when I think of Hymie Gordon, the son of a rabbi. The passage is this:
They shall
question you concerning what they should
expend. Say "The abundance!"
Hymie had an abundance undreamt of by most other men, and he spent it
with exhilarating joy and generosity of spirit. Even his name held
unsuspected riches.
Names sometimes encode remarkable historical information. It is well known that the name "Pluto" was given to the ninth planet because of its mythological appropriateness. Less well known is the fact that astronomers at the Lowell Observatory chose the name because its first two letters, "PL," are the initials of Percival Lowell, who played a central role in the search for the ninth planet.
You may have wondered how it came about that Hymie Gordon, a man of such aristocratic, even regal, bearing, was given the name, "Hymie," which sounds like a nickname. I never discussed the matter with him, but I think I know how it happened.
The name "Hymie" sounds like a nickname because it is a nickname, a diminutive of the Hebrew "Chaim," which means life. Before the first World War, when Lithuania was a territory of Russia, there was a law forbidding Jewish parents from giving their children full Biblical names. A family that wanted to name a son "Abraham" was forced to use a truncated version like "Abram." Parents who wanted to name a son "Chaim" had to use the diminutive "Hymie."
When Hymie Gordon was born in South Africa, his parents were free to give him any name they chose. I am convinced that they chose the name of a beloved departed family member who had been born in territory under the repressive Russian regime. If this is true, Hymie's name, like a tapestry containing a hidden figure, recalls both the repression under which his ancestors lived and the love and family loyalty by which his own family triumphed over that repression.
Quite apart from its historical and familial meanings, the name "Hymie" is stunningly appropriate for our dear friend. Life indeed! I have been blessed in my friendships, but I have never had a friend who lived more vibrantly and joyously than Hymie Gordon. Nor have I ever known a man who defended and cherished innocent human life more passionately and powerfully.
Nearly two decades ago, when he and I spoke on medical ethics at the then fledgling Mayo Medical School, a student asked Hymie Gordon a question about a topic already on its way to fashionability: death and dying. Hymie replied: "I am not interested in death. I do not study death. I am a doctor. I study life. My subject is life!" On the topic of living wills Hymie Gordon said: "We have no need for living wills. What we need is the will to live!" Concerning the prevalent use of the dehumanizing technical term "fetus" in current abortion debates he said: "I have been practicing medicine for more than forty years and have delivered babies on three continents and never once has a woman said to me 'Doctor, how is my fetus doing?'."
Hymie Gordon was appalled by the movement to enlist physicians in the deliberate destruction of human beings through abortion and euthanasia. With Professor Elizabeth Anscombe and me, he founded the Program in Human Rights and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, a program dedicated to the serious study of problems in medical ethics and to the free exchange of ideas concerning their solution. Over the past seven-and-a-half years, along with several of us in the room, he gave thousands of hours of his time to the Program.
A scrupulous attachment to fairness and the ideals of a university informed all his work in the Program and was conspicuously in evidence during the very last seminar over which he presided, just weeks before his death. The seminar was a presentation on assisted reproduction by a physician whose views on medical ethics were diametrically opposed to his own. So opposed that this physician casually referred to the selective aborting of multiple embryos as "dinking a pregnancy." Our aim that day was to learn the valuable clinical information the distinguished physician had to impart. Hymie Gordon uttered not a word in criticism of the cavalier references to abortion and treated our guest with cordial courtesy.
Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote:
Photographing means recognizing in a single instant, a split second, both a fact, and the precise organization of visually perceived forms that embodies that fact. It means putting head, eye, and heart in one line of sight.
That was Hymie Gordon exactly. Head, eye and heart in one line of
sight. A superlative speaker sought after by universities, learned
societies, and pro-life groups, he lectured at major centers of
learning all over the planet. And his range of topics was as far flung
as the venues at which he spoke. It was a dazzling experience to
witness the orderly and rapid-fire marshaling of arguments by a mind
whose store of knowledge ranged from Biblical archaeology to molecular
biology. Bold, original, deeply learned, supremely self-confident, at
times sharply polemical, always fresh and stimulating. Whether he was
discussing the practices of the ancient Asclepiades or the Human Genome
Project, his laser focus was the true Hippocratic end of medicine, the
care and cherishing and protection of human life. Head, eye, and heart
in one line of sight.
Brisk, daring, precise in utterance, dazzlingly articulate, possessed of a devilish wit, always elegantly attired, gracious, indeed, courtly in manner, always generous of heart, Hymie Gordon showered us with more gifts than we can easily recount. For example, after today, who at the Mayo Clinic will be able to name a new disease or coin some new scientific terminology without an uneasy sense of having perhaps committed a linguistic transgression which Hymie would have swiftly and cheerfully put right? Without hearing him say: "This is a barbarism! You're joining a Latin stem with a Greek suffix!"
A final word about our dear friend. He lectured as you all know with unparalleled and enthralling virtuosity. A small but significant episode illustrates the secret of his power as a lecturer and as a human being. A year ago, he delivered here a lecture that had been part of the magnificent, three-year, sixty-lecture cycle on medicine in history he had given at the Mayo Clinic. As anyone who heard the lecture on "Beethoven and Medical Practice in 19th Century Vienna" knows, it was powerful and profoundly moving. When he concluded, his audience of hundreds, which included scores of physicians, jumped up and delivered a thunderous ovation. Tears were streaming down the cheeks of more than a few people. A huge portrait of Beethoven was projected on the screen. Beethoven's majestic music could barely be heard over the thunderous applause. And Hymie Gordon stood with his back to the audience and applauded the enormous image of Beethoven. This was not a theatrical gesture. It told of the real power of his lectures. His wit, his astonishing verbal dexterity, his rapid-fire command of logic and fact, his capacity to instruct and amuse and delight were all subordinated to his subject. For Hymie Gordon, the subject, whether Beethoven's music or the structure of DNA, was the star.
Our dear friend, who carried so much of human civilization in his own person now rests in the ancient city of Jerusalem, which has been the vessel of so much of the spiritual grace of human civilization. The man who was a living embodiment of the consecration of learning now rests in one of the ancient centers of learning and wisdom. If he could give us counsel in our present grief he might borrow a poet's words and say that more important than the fact that our hearts are broken is the fact that we have hearts. He might teach us that the scars about to form on our hearts will speak of more than the painful wound we now suffer: they will attest to the power that heals our hearts, the power to which our beloved friend and brother, whose very name means life, devoted his entire life and soul.
- John M Dolan
Jasper Hopkins, PhD, RN
Jasper Hopkins received his B.A. degree in philosophy (1958) from
Wheaton College, and his M.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1963) degrees in
philosophy from Harvard University. He is currently Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, where he first came in 1970.
Prior thereto he taught at Case Institute of Technology (now
Case-Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, at the University of
Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at the University of Massachusetts in
Boston. He spent three nonconsecutive years engaged in post-doctoral
research in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale, two other years
in Munich at the Grabmann Institut für Philosophie und Theologie
des Mittelalters and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, three months in
Padua at the Istituto di Storia della Filosofia, and an academic year
in Rome at the Pontificia Università Gregoriana. During the
academic year 1981-82 he was a visiting professor of philosophy at the
University of Graz (Austria); likewise, during the winter semester of
1986-87 he was a visiting professor at the University of Munich. In the
visiting professorships he taught on Greek and Medieval philosophy,
existentialism and freedom of the will, and epistemic problems in the
philosophy of religion. Professor Hopkins is the author or translator
of some twenty-four books in the field of Medieval philosophy. He has
held research fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was
elected to membership in the international wissenschaftlicher Beirat
of the Cusanus Society in Germany. He is a consulting editor for Mitteilungen
und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft. In May, 1990
Hopkins received an Associate of Applied Science degree from the
College of St. Catherine/St. Mary's Campus (Minneapolis). He became a
registered nurse in the same year and a certified emergency nurse in
April, 1992. Thereafter he has also worked in post-coronary care units
in telemetry (12-lead EKG monitoring) and in long-term care with
patients suffering from head injury and neurological impairments. Not
surprisingly, he teaches medical ethics in the Department of Philosophy
and is member of the graduate faculty for the minor in biomedical
ethics, and has directed dissertations on topics ranging from
Heraclitus, to medical ethics, to the hermeneutics of history. Jasper Hopkins's webpage.
Konald A Prem, MD
Konald Prem, MD, member of the Advisory Board of the Program in Human
Rights and Medicine and former head of the Department of Obstetrics and
Gynecology at the University of Minnesota, presented a paper on
"Gynecological Oncology" at a three-day conference on "Optimizing
Health for Older Persons: Practical Strategy" sponsored by the
Department of Family Practice in St. Paul last June. During that same
month he participated in a panel discussion titled "Ask the Doctor/Ask
the Pharmacist: Concerns and Effects of Medications" at an
international conference in St. Paul marking the silver anniversary of
the Couple to Couple League, an organization he helped to found and
whose medical board he has headed throughout its history. In May, Dr.
Prem attended the annual meeting of the American Association of
Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Denver, Colorado. In August
he attended a board meeting of the National Commission on Human Life,
Reproduction, and Rhythm whose purpose was to decide questions that
needed resolution to enable the quarterly publication, Child and
Family, to move its publication operations from Chicago to Pittsburgh.
Philip J Regal, AB, MA, PhD
Phil Regal is professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior in the
College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota. He holds
graduate faculty memberships in Conservation Biology, Ecology,
Evolution and Behavior; Liberal Studies; Development Studies and Social
Change; and Microbial Ecology. He also teaches courses on the
confluence of science and ideology (e.g. reductionism), and on ecology
and the history of ideas in the Department of Comparative Literature
and Cultural Studies. After completing his Ph.D. in Zoology in 1968 at
UCLA. Thereafter he was a postdoctoral trainee in Mental Health,
National Institute of Mental Health, at the Brain Research Center at
UCLA and Department of Neurosciences Laboratory at the Scripps
Institute of Oceanography.
His research interests include principles and examples of biological adaptation; the Bonobo (pan paniscus); genetic engineering, transgenic organisms, biosafety and risk assessment; the mind and brain as an adaptive system; the shaping of the modern mind and institutions (discussed in his 1990 book The Anatomy of Judgment); science policy; relationship between corporate interests, institutional ethics, and academic freedom; and chronobiology (conducting research in the Halberg Center for Chronobiology). His seminars and lectures presented at the Program in Human Rights and Medicine have discussed such topics as “The Bonobo,” “Genetic Engineering: Revising the Foundations of Ethics,” and academic freedom.
Dr. Regal has served on international and national committees such as the UNESCO Committee on Man and the Biosphere, the Carnegie/AAAS “Project 2061: Education for a Changing Future,” the National Science Foundation Biological Centers Program Committee, the Sloan Foundation Molecular Evolution Program Committee, the Office of Technology Assessment Study of Non-indigenous Species in the U.S., serves on the Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution Editorial Board, the Humanist Institute (New York). In 1996 he was elected to the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. He also serves on the Board of Directors of CENSHARE (Center to Study Human-Animal Relationships and Environment) at the University of Minnesota and is an Advisory Board Member of the Program in Human Rights and Medicine.
David
Weissbrodt, BA, JD
Professor David Weissbrodt, co-director of the Human Rights Center and
member of the Advisory Board of the Program in Human Rights and
Medicine, attended Columbia University and the London School of
Economics. He received his J.D. degree from the University of
California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall), where he was Note and Comment
Editor of the California Law Review and a member of the Order of the
Coif. After graduation, he clerked for Justice Matthew O. Tobriner of
the California Supreme Court and practiced law with Covington &
Burling. He joined the University of Minnesota Law School faculty in
1975 and has been a visiting professor at the Universite Jean Moulin in
Lyon, France. Since joining the law faculty, he has written several
books and numerous articles on international human rights law,
immigration law, and other subjects. His present endowed chair (his
third) is as Fredrickson and Byron Professor of Law.
He has represented and served as an officer of several international human rights organizations including Amnesty International, the Center for Victims of Torture, Readers International, the International League for Human Rights. He was cofounder of the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. Additionally he is also a member of the American Law Institute, the American Society of International Law, and the editorial review boards of Human Rights Quarterly and the Netherlands Quarterly Human Rights.
In the Spring of 1996, Professor Weissbrodt was elected by the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights to serve a four-year term as
the United States member of the U.N. Sub-Commission on Prevention of
Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. The Sub-Commission meets
annually to authorize studies by its 26 members of such issues as human
rights and disability, traditional health practices affecting the
health of women and children, fair trial, and other topics. It is also
responsible for responding to human rights violations in such countries
as Burundi, Iran, Iraq, Rwanda, and Turkey. In addition to his work on
the Sub-Commission, Prof. Weissbrodt is spent academic year 1996-97 on
sabbatical with his family in Geneva, where he is teaching human rights
law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies at the
University of Geneva, Switzerland. In 2001 he was named chair of the
U.N. Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. He
is the first U.S. citizen to head a U.N. human rights bodies since
Eleanor Roosevelt. In 2002 he published with Anti-Slavery International
the book Abolishing Slavery and Its Contemporary Forms, UN Doc.
HR/Pub/02/4.
In 2003 Professor Weissbrodt, with 25 committee members, drafted the “Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights” (U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/2003/12/Rev.2 (2003)). These norms concern the rights of workers, indigenous peoples, and the protection of children. The Norms articulate the responsibility of corporations not to benefit from war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other crimes against the human person including slave or coerced labor. Additional obligations concern provision of a safe and health working environment and remuneration commensurate with an adequate standard of living (contextually defined). Further obligations include not participating in bribery and other forms of corruption; adopt the precautionary principle with regard to product safety, promote physical and mental health, and observe local law and international agreements with regard to the environment, human rights (including freedom of conscience, religion and expression), public health and safety, bioethics and the precautionary principle toward realizing sustainable development.
Finally, in 2004, he published, with Donald Marshall, The Common
Law Process of Torts.