Values in the regulation of human organ transplantation
25 May - 29 June 2025
Biography
Jackie Leach Scully is Professor of Bioethics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where she is also Director of the Disability Innovation Institute. With a first degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University and a PhD in Pathology from Cambridge, she worked for some years in biomedical research before her interests took her in the direction of medical ethics and bioethics. She co-founded the first interdisciplinary bioethics unit at the University of Basel, Switzerland, before returning to the UK to join the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. At Newcastle she worked within the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences (PEALS) Research Centre, eventually becoming Executive Director. She moved to UNSW Sydney in 2019.
Jackie’s bioethics research interests have always been empirically based, with a view to understanding how various biomedical and life science technologies are evaluated as ethical, or not. Her projects have spanned a wide range of technologies, from reproductive medicine, prenatal testing and gene editing, to disaster victim identification and artificial intelligence. Jackie has been deaf since early childhood and her work has had a particular focus on disability, in line with her disability activism.
In 2015 she had an emergency liver transplant, and since then has been thinking and writing about the ethics of transplantation from the recipient’s perspective. She is currently completing a research monograph (Incorporated: Ethics and Experience in Transplantation, Oxford University Press, due out in 2025), which centres patient experience in a way that challenges many dominant assumptions about organ donation. This is in contrast with most bioethical work on organ donation and transplantation, which has primarily addressed the ethics of organ acquisition and allocation. As Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2025, she will collaborate with the Centre for Health, Law and Society and Centre for Ethics in Medicine to develop further mutually interesting lines of work on transplantation and disability ethics.
Research Summary
While at Bristol, Jackie will seek to build on her work on organ transplantation in collaboration with Bristol academics. This work will take its starting point in an exploration of her own experiences following an emergency liver transplant and those of her host, Professor Sally Sheldon, who acted as a non-directed kidney donor in 2019. Their experiences will be used as a prompt to interrogate aspects of the ethical and regulatory landscape of organ donation and recipientship in the UK, with a focus on, first, the role played by altruism in underpinning legal and cultural norms around donation and, second, the role of spouses/partners in the donation process.
In addition to this collaborative research, a range of activities are planned for Jackie’s visit, including the following. First, she will give a public lecture hosted by the Centre for Health, Law and Society and the Centre for Ethics in Medicine. Second, she will participate in an interdisciplinary one-day workshop on the issue of altruism in healthcare, hosted by the Centre for Health Law and Society. Third, she will give a postgraduate seminar on auto-ethnographical methods, open to all University of Bristol research students.
Professor Scully's lectures and seminars will be listed on our Events page in due course.
You can contact Professor Scully's host Professor Sally Sheldon for further information.
