About Alice Dreger: Alice Domurat Dreger is an American bioethicist, author, and former professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.
After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law. I probably would have made a lot more money and died of boredom by now.
After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law.
We say, 'You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.' Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn't care that we like nice, ...
I don't know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP's assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I'm not at all sure. I just know I don't feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I'm feeling increasingly surrounded ...
Conjoined twins simply may not need sex-romance partners as much as the rest of us do. Throughout time and space, they have described their condition as something like being attached to a soul mate.
I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
According to my mother, there pretty much wasn't anything I wouldn't eat as a child. Not just try, but eat. I was even inclined to dig into stuff about which she expressed open disgust - lobster and other shellfish, and cheap Chinese food with pepper...
When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does y...
I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.
The funny thing is, when I ask people with dark skin if they would change their color, they tell me no, and when I ask women if they would rather be men, they tell me no, and I get the same response when I ask people with unusual anatomies if they wo...
So many times I've heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won't really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It's a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.
You know what Oprah taught me? Unless you count as changing your life having a neighborhood dad say to you every morning at the school bus stop, 'You sure don't look as good as you did on 'Oprah!', being on 'Oprah' doesn't change your life.
What we should care about is health - reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is 'normal.' A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that sepa...
Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we p...
Purposefully exposing young people to increased risks of major brain problems - even death - for sport is surely even more ethically complicated than sending young people into this same neurological danger zone as soldiers.
The safety argument against steroids may be a good one, but let's be honest. It isn't the one that motivates most officials and fans to frown on steroids. Steroid use does not just seem risky or unnatural, it seems to disrupt the level playing field.
You can't go into new life experiences without the understanding that yeah, you may fail, but knowing you might fail can't stop you from trying.
Want to be a well-paid bioethicist, with one, two, or even three university appointments? Just get yourself a two-piece navy polyester suit and follow these three simple rules: (1) Never name names. (2) Screw principles; just follow procedures. (3) B...
We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature.
