Graeme Laurie

Graeme Laurie is Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the AHRC/SCRIPT research centre which explores the relationship between law and new technologies. It is sponsored by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Graeme is also the current Chair of the UK Biobank Ethics and Governance Council and sits on a number of other bodies, including the British Medical Association's Ethics Committee and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

Eric Meslin

Dr. Eric Meslin is Founding Director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics, Associate Dean for Bioethics and Professor of Medicine, Medical and Molecular Genetics, Public Health and Philosophy.

He came to Indiana University in July 2001 from the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), where he had been Executive Director since 1998. NBAC was appointed by President Bill Clinton to advise the White House and the federal government on a range of bioethics issues including cloning, stem cell research, international clinical trials, and genetics studies. Prior to his work at NBAC, Meslin was Program Director in the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) program at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

A Canadian by birth, Dr. Meslin received his B.A. in Philosophy from York University in Toronto, and both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Bioethics Program in Philosophy at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. He has held academic positions at the University of Toronto (1988-96) and at Oxford University (1994-95) and in addition to his Indiana University appointments, is also Visiting Professor-at-Large at the University of Western Australia.

He has more than 100 publications on topics ranging from international health research to science policy, including Belmont Revisited: Ethical Principles for Research with Human Subjects (2005) co-edited with James F. Childress and Harold T. Shapiro. He has been a consultant to the World Health Organization, the US Observer Mission to UNESCO, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and sits on several boards and committees including the Stem Cell Oversight Committee of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Indiana Organ Procurement Organization, Indiana Public Umbilical Cord Blood Bank (Appointed by Governor Mitch Daniels), and the Board of Directors of Genome Canada. On May 9, 2007 he was appointed a Chevalier de L'Ordre Nationale du Mérite (Knight of the National Order of Merit) by the President of France.

Amy McGuire

Amy L. McGuire, J.D., Ph.D. is an associate professor of medicine and medical ethics and associate director of research with the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine. She received her B.A. in psychology, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, her J.D., summa cum laude, from the University of Houston, and her Ph.D. in medical humanities from the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Dr. McGuire's research focuses on legal and ethical issues in genetics and genomics, with a particular interest in genetic research and personalized genomic medicine. She is currently studying participant attitudes toward broad data sharing in genome-wide association studies, ethical issues in human microbiome research, and consumer expectations regarding the clinical integration of direct-to-consumer personal genome testing services. Her research is funded by the NHGRI-ELSI program and the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics.

Aled Edwards

Aled Edwards, Ph.D., is Banbury Professor of Medical Research at the University of Toronto, visiting professor of chemical biology at the University of Oxford, and chief executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public–private partnership that generates reagents and knowledge for human proteins and places its results into the public domain, without restriction on use.

Funded by industry, governments, and charitable foundations, the SGC accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s output of human protein structures and more than 75 percent of the world’s output of proteins from the parasites that cause malaria, toxoplasmosis, and cryptosporidiosis. Edwards believes that new medicines would be most efficiently discovered by performing initial aspects of research, from discovery to clinical proof of concept, within precompetitive research consortia and by deemphasizing the importance of patents. Edwards was scientific consultant for the Canadian dramatic TV series, ReGenesis, and has founded a number of biotechnology companies.

Andrew W. Torrance

Andrew Torrance joined the Kansas University Law faculty in 2005 and, in 2009, was named a Docking Faculty Scholar, a university-wide program to honour faculty members who have distinguished themselves in their early careers. He was also a 2009-10 Fellow in Law, Innovation and Growth at the Searle Center at Northwestern University Law School. In August of 2010, Torrance was invited by Google Inc. to give a TechTalk, “The Patent Game: Experiments in the Cathedral of Law,” now available in its entirety on the YouTube Google TechTalk channel.

He received his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University in 1997 and is a 2000 graduate of Harvard Law School. He earned his Bachelor of Science from Queen’s University in Canada. In 2003, he was named the Hrdy Visiting Professor of Conservation Biology at Harvard University and taught Biodiversity: Science, Policy, and Law at Harvard University from 1999 until his arrival at KU.

He practiced biotechnology patent law at Fish and Richardson PC, the world’s largest intellectual property law firm. He served as inhouse patent counsel at Inverness Medical Innovations, a global biotechnology company with headquarters in Boston, and helped start Stirling Medical Innovations, a cardiac diagnostics biotechnology company based in Scotland. He has presented his research across the United States, as well as in Canada, and across Europe. Several of his articles have been listed on SSRN (Social Science Research Network) Top Ten Lists. In the spring of 2009, Torrance was invited to present his research to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) at Headquarters in Paris.

Since 2007, Torrance has run Biolaw: Law at the Frontiers of Biology, an annual conference that gathers leading scholars at KU Law to present their insights on the latest developments in biolaw. His interests in biology have led to research expeditions in remote areas of the world. He has served as chairman of the Scientific and Creative Board of the Darwin Project, a major biodiversity institution planned for downtown Boston, is a member of the board of East Wind Power, and has assisted the BioBricks Foundation (BBF).

Torrance's research interests include intellectual property, patent law, innovation law, biotechnology, biolaw, food and drug law, biodiversity law, climate change law, and international environmental law. He teaches classes in intellectual property law, patent law, food and drug law, and biodiversity law.