President Obama appointed philosopher John D. Arras, Ph. He has also served as a longtime fellow and former board member of the Hastings Center, consults regularly at the National Institutes of Health, and is a founding member of the ethics advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As a child Arras already seemed to have the mindset of a philosopher. At an early age he developed a love for fly fishing; a sport that he says allows an individual the opportunity to be one with their thoughts.
Arras went to college at the University of San Francisco knowing that his father wanted him to join the family engineering business. However, in his freshman year he found himself bored with business classes and intrigued by classes that left him wrestling with difficult ethical issues.
He later studied in Paris. Ricoeur is known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics; in he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.
Arras said this time with Ricoeur is what led him to realize his future. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asked the Bioethics Commission to conduct a thorough review of the ethical considerations of conducting clinical trials of medical countermeasures with children, and to make recommendations regarding the conduct of trials of anthrax vaccine absorbed AVA post-exposure prophylaxis in children.
