Disability Bioethics with Prof. Jackie Leach Scully

Professor Jackie Leach Scully is the Director of the UNSW Disability Innovation Institute and a leading researcher in the field of Bioethics (the ethical and social aspects of biomedical advances). In this seminar, Professor Scully explores the relationship between disability and bioethics, and the implications of disability bioethics, focusing on the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Scully studied biochemistry at the University of Oxford and has a PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Cambridge. After holding postdoctoral research fellowships in biomedicine in Lausanne and Basel, Switzerland, she was asked to help establish the first interdisciplinary bioethics institute at the University of Basel where she was able to pursue her interests in the ethics and governance of genetic science. On returning to the UK she was for several years Professor of Social Ethics and Bioethics, and Executive Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre at Newcastle University. Somewhere along the way she also took an MA in psychoanalytic theory from Sheffield University because she thought it might be fun.

Jackie’s research interests include several topics across bioethics, but her work is particularly known for a focus on ‘disability bioethics’, specifically looking at selective reproductive technologies, genomics, prostheses and assistive devices, people with disabilities in disaster and humanitarian response, and concepts of vulnerability and justice. In addition she has a strong focus in feminist bioethics and is currently Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Society of Arts of the UK, holds an honorary professorship at Newcastle University, and has been an activist for disability rights for over 30 years.