Arthur Caplan

Arthur L. Caplan (born 1950) is an American ethicist and professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

Born in Boston in 1950 to Sidney D. and Natalie Caplan, Arthur Caplan grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts.

He has described his family as "Workmen's Circle, Zionist, and secular."

He credits his background of Judaism with stimulating his interest in methods of inquiry and argument.

At age six, Caplan was diagnosed with polio.

He was successfully treated at Children's Hospital in Boston and went on to play sports at Framingham North High School.

Caplan has stated that this life-threatening illness was a formative experience that influenced his later commitment to philosophy and bioethics.

Caplan did his undergraduate work at Brandeis University, where he majored in philosophy.

There he met his future wife Jane.

Caplan did his graduate work at Columbia University, receiving an M.A. in 1973, an M.Phil.

in 1975, and a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science in 1979.

His dissertation, Philosophical Issues Concerning the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, was co-supervised by Ernest Nagel and Sidney Morgenbesser.

Caplan worked with Nagel as a teaching assistant and was the final graduate student of Nagel's career.

During his time at Columbia, Caplan met psychoanalyst and Dean of Education Bernard Schoenberg.

Schoenberg allowed him to participate as both an observer and a medical student in clinical rotations in the university's medical college, first experiencing "ethics in action".

In 1977, Caplan met Daniel Callahan, a philosopher who co-founded The Hastings Center (now in Garrison, New York) with psychiatrist Willard Gaylin.

In 1977, Caplan joined The Hastings Center, first as a junior research assistant and then as a post-doctoral fellow.

He is known for his contributions to the U.S. public policy, including: helping to found the National Marrow Donor Program; creating the policy of required request in cadaver organ donation adopted throughout the United States; helping to create the system for distributing organs in the U.S.; and advising on the content of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, rules governing living organ donation, and legislation and regulation in many other areas of health care including blood safety and compassionate use.

Their son, Zachary, was born in 1984.

Caplan's second wife, Meg O’Shea Caplan, is the medical center director of the Bronx VA Medical Center.

He spent the next 10 years at the center, serving as the associate director from 1985 to 1987.

During this time, Caplan published many papers on genetics (including the ethics of genetic testing and screening), evolution, sociobiology, and the teaching of ethics.

He also became involved in the ethics of human and animal experimentation and new medical technologies, applying philosophy in public discourse and speaking on public policy issues.

In 1987, Caplan moved to the University of Minnesota, where he became a professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Surgery and the first director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics.

In 1989, he organized the Center for Bioethics Conference on Medical Ethics and the Holocaust, the first conference convened to discuss bioethics and the Holocaust.

During his time at Minnesota he was active on issues relating to organ transplantation and genetics and worked with Rosalie A. Kane on dilemmas of "everyday ethics" involving treatment of the elderly.

He also wrote about bioethics in relation to the Holocaust.

In the mid-1990s, he and colleagues conducted the first empirical studies on organ donor eligibility and donation rates.

Caplan secured the first apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, from Lewis Sullivan, M.D., then secretary of HHS, in 1991.

In 1992, he joined the Medical Advisory Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In May 1994, Caplan went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

He founded the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Medical Ethics and had professorial appointments in a variety of departments including Medicine and Philosophy.

In 2009, the Sidney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics was established at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, named for Caplan's father.

Arthur Caplan became the first holder of the professorship.

While at the University of Pennsylvania, he became the first bioethicist to be sued for his professional role, after his involvement in a gene therapy trial that resulted in the death of research subject Jesse Gelsinger.

The family's suit was settled with the University for an undisclosed amount of money, in exchange for, among other things, dropping Caplan from the suit.

The federal government's suit on the same facts was settled for $500,000.

In 2009, Caplan helped develop the first flu vaccine mandate at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and, later, New York state's policy to require health care workers to "vaccinate or mask".

Also in 2009, he called for tightening restrictions on fertility clinics and IVF and has written extensively in favor of embryonic stem cell research.

He worked with William Seidelman, M.D., and others to secure in 2012 an apology from the German Medical Association for the role of German physicians in Nazi prison experiments during the Holocaust.