Professor George Annas

George Annas is the Edward R. Utley Professor and Chair of the Health Law Department of Boston University School of Public Health, and Professor in the Boston University School of Medicine and School of Law. He is the cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, a transnational professional association of lawyers and physicians working together to promote human rights and health. He has degrees from Harvard College (AB, economics '67), Harvard Law School (JD '70) and Harvard School of Public Health (MPH '72), as well as an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Salem State College ('94), which he was awarded for "his scholarship, value analysis, and persistent advocacy for human rights."

Professor Annas has written more than 200 articles on health law and bioethics. He wrote a regular feature on "law and bioethics" for the Hastings Center Report from 1976 to 199l and a regular feature on "Public Health and the Law" in the American Journal of Public Health from 1982 to 1992. Since 1991 he has written a regular feature on "Legal Issues in Medicine" for the New England Journal of Medicine. He is the author or editor of twelve books on health law, including The Rights of Patients (1975), Judging Medicine (1987), and Standard of Care (l993), and a play entitled Shelley's Brain, that has been presented to bioethics audiences across the U.S. and in Australia. His most recent books are Some Choice: Law, Medicine & the Market (Oxford, 1998), and Health and Human Rights (Routledge, 1999, co-edited). 

He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Institute of Medicine, co-chair of the American Bar Association's Committee on Medical Practice and Medical Research (Science and Technology Section), an honorary fellow of the American College of Legal Medicine, and the founder of the Law, Medicine, and Ethics Program at Boston University. He has also held a variety of government regulatory posts, including Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, Chair of the Massachusetts Health Facilities Appeals Board, and Chair of the Commonwealth's Organ Transplant Task Force.