A BIOETHICIST from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Robin Alta Charo has written or collaborated on nearly 100 journal articles, book chapters, and government reports on a wide variety of topics ranging from environmental law to family planning regulations to abortion law and reproductive policy, playing an important part in the debate over medical genetics and cloning laws, as well as general science bioethical issues and dilemmas.
Robin Alta Charo was born in 1958 in Brooklyn, New York, and completed her Bachelor’s in biology at Harvard-Radcliffe, graduating from Harvard University Law School in 1979 as Robin Anne Charo. She then studied for a law degree from Columbia University, and from 1982 until 1985, she served as associate director of the Legislative Drafting Research Fund of Columbia University, living in Brooklyn, New York. She then spent a year as a Fulbright Junior Lecturer in American Law at the University of Paris I, the Sorbonne, in France, from 1985 to 1986, returning to the United States in 1986 to take up an appointment as a legal analyst for the Biological Applications Program of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. She held this position until 1988, by which time she was also an American Association for the Advancement of Science diplomacy fellow for the Policy Development Division of the Office of Population at the U.S. Agency for International Development. In 1989 Charo was appointed to the School of Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and from July 1, 2002, on, she was the associate dean for research and faculty development at the School of Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
During Charo’s time at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she has been a visiting professor at a range of medical schools and law schools around the world including in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Cuba, France, Germany, and New Zealand. In 2006, from January until December of that year, she was a visiting professor of law at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Charo is now a member of the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Medical School’s Department of Medical History and Bioethics, serves on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Masters in Biotechnology Studies program, and lectures in the Master’s of Public Health program of the Department of Population Health Sciences. She also offers courses at the university on health law, bioethics and biotechnology law, food and drug laws, medical ethics and problems arising from them, reproductive rights, torts, and legislative drafting. A member of the university’s Bioethics Advisory Committee, Charo is also a member of the university’s Institutional Review Board.
Making a wide contribution to ethical problems facing medical researchers, Charo has always been cautious about new developments being applied to humans because of the possible medical complications that might arise. As a result, when she had to deal with the issue of cloning, she argued for more research into the possible risks that such advances might contribute to higher rates of birth defects, miscarriages, and other medical problems and complications. Her ideas have influenced a large number of books on bioethics, and Charo has written extensively on many subjects.
CONTROVERSY
In 1994, she served as a member of the National Institutes of Health Human Embryo Research Panel, and from 1996 until 2001, she was also a member of the U.S. Presidential National Bio-ethics Advisory Commission under President Bill Clinton. In these last two roles, Charo was seen by some as controversial, with religious and evangelical groups attacking her support for stem cell research and the keeping of embryo banks.
This assault was particularly fierce after her involvement in the drafting of such reports as “Cloning Human Beings” in 1997 and “Research Involving Persons with Mental Disorders that May Affect Decision Making Capacity” in 1998; “Research Involving Human Biological Materials: Ethical Issues and Policy Guidance” and “Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research” in 1999; “Ethical and Policy Issues in International Research: Clinical Trials in Developing Countries” in 2001; and “Ethical and Policy Issues in Research Involving Human Participants” in 2001. Charo, in an interview with New Scientist magazine in 1998, pointed out that “The average person doesn’t realize they leave tissue around all the time” and that many newborn babies often have blood taken from them for routine genetic screening; this blood can then be stored for decades.
Charo is currently a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, as well as Cloning: Science and Policy and the Monash Bioethics Review. She is also a member of the board of the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York City and Washington, D.C., as well as the Foundation for Genetic Medicine, and has been a member of the board for the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health Research, the American Association of Bioethics, and the
National Medical Advisory Committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, as well as the program board of amfAR—the Foundation for AIDS Research.
In the past, Charo has also been a member of the steering committee established to found the International Association for Bioethics and has served as a consultant to the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine and the National Institute of Health Office of Protection from Research Risks. She has also been on the board of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health and what had been the American Association for Bioethics, as well as being on the ethics advisory board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2005 she helped draft the National Academies’ Guidelines for Embryonic Stem Cell Research and was appointed to the ethics standards working group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
In 2006 Charo was appointed as a cochair of the National Academies’ Human Embryonic Stem Cell Advisory Committee.
