Ezekiel Emanuel

EZEKIEL EMANUEL

Ideas

Responses

Ezekiel Emanuel is the Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Emanuel is a well-known authority on the ethics of clinical research, end of life care issues, euthanasia and the ethics of managed care. He has published in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancent, JAMA, and many other medical journals. His book The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity received an honorable mention for the Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Dr. Emanuel was educated at Amherst College, Oxford University and Harvard University, from which he holds both an MD and PhD in political philosophy. He also served on the ethics section of President Clinton's Health Care Task Force, on the National Bioethics Advisory Committee, and on the bioethics panel of the Pan American Health Organization.

Ideas recorded at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival on: 7/5/07

Interests

Most Recent Idea

Africa

Re: What does Africa need?

11/20/2007

Description: The “Big Man Syndrome” isn’t a result of colonialism, Emanuel says.

Transcript: Clearly Africa has huge problems. I actually – having traveled there many, many times – think that colonialism clearly has a part. But the fact is the “Big Man Syndrome” isn’t a result of colonialism, the corruption, the suppression of women is not . . . Those are not problems of colonialism. Those are endemic, cultural problems of people, and they need to begin to overcome that. And there are some places which are very helpful. Mali, which is an incredibly poor country – its average per capita income there is under $200 a year – has had a stable transfer of power and government. And you know, that’s a very hopeful sign. Now we have to give them a stable economy and figure out how they can actually develop, and work with them on that. And I think there are other places which can be big successes, but it’s gonna take patience; it’s gonna take investment. It takes a long term strategy. That’s not something the United States is very good at. I mean the long term, we are awful at the long-term.

Recorded on: 7/5/07