Margaret Somerville
Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law, McGill University.
Last Contribution:
The Charter: ‘Applied Ethics’ in Law's Clothing?
Contributor Biography
Dr. Somerville is Samuel Gale professor of law, professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law at McGill University in Montreal.
She has an extensive national and international publishing and speaking record, and is a frequent commentator in all forms of media.
She authored The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit (Penguin, 2000); Death Talk: The Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (MQUP, 2002); and The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (Anansi, 2006), which she delivered as the nationally broadcast CBC 2006 Massey Lectures. She has also edited Do We Care? Renewing Canada's Commitment to Health (MQUP, 1999); and co-edited Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge (MQUP/EOLSS, 2000).
She regularly consults, nationally and internationally, to a wide variety of bodies including governments and NGOs. She has received many honours and awards including the Order of Australia, six honorary doctorates, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2003, she was chosen by an international jury as the first recipient of the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science.
