This fall, Glenn Cohen ’03, Harvard Law School professor and faculty director for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, delivered a talk titled “Are There Non-human Persons? Are There Non-person Humans?,” which explored how law and morality should accommodate animals and artificial intelligence alongside human beings. The talk was presented before a crowd of more than 2,300 at the Boston Opera House as part of TEDxCambridge, an independently-organized TED event, and one of the longest-running and largest TEDx conferences in the world.
A leading scholar of law and bioethics, Cohen is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books and book chapters, including “Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics” (Oxford Univ. Press 2015), and (with Holly Fernandez Lynch) “FDA in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies” (Columbia Univ. Press 2015).
He has authored more than 100 articles, which have appeared in a wide range of outlets including the Stanford Law Review, the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times. Cohen was selected as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow for the 2012-2013 academic year, as a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar Award recipient in Bioethics, and currently serves as a fellow of the Hastings Center, a leading bioethics think tank. His free online HarvardX course Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics has enrolled more than 20,000 students to date.