Erik Parens, PhD, is a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research institute in Garrison, NY. There he investigates the ethical and social implications of using technologies like pharmacology and surgery to shape ourselves, and he investigates how emerging sciences like genetics and neuroscience shape our self-understanding. He has received many grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health, which have resulted in numerous publications, including edited volumes such as: Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications (Georgetown U Press, 1998); Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights (Georgetown, 2000); Wrestling with Behavioral Genetics: Ethics, Science, and Public Conversation (Johns Hopkins U Press, 2005); and Surgically Shaping Children, (Johns Hopkins, 2006). In 2015 he published Shaping Our Selves: On Technology, Flourishing, and a Habit of Thinking (Oxford University Press). Mr. Parens has served as a consultant to several governmental and nongovernmental bodies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and the Presidential Commission on the Study of Bioethical Issues. He is currently a member of the Steering Committee of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic, and Behavioral Genetics, and is a Fellow in the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society.
