Professor of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
Alex John London
Professor London was named director of the CEP in July of 2007. An elected fellow of the Hastings Center, he has written extensively on problems in bioethics and ethical theory relating to uncertainty, risk, fairness, equality and justice. He also works on methodological issues in both theoretical and applied ethics. His papers have appeared in Mind, Science, The Philosopher's Imprint, The Lancet, PLoS Medicine, Statistics In Medicine, The Hastings Center Report, and numerous other journals and collections. He is co-editor of Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, one of the most widely used textbooks in medical ethics and recipient of the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Distinguished Teaching and Educational Service in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.
Professor London has helped to shape key ethical guidelines for the oversight of research with human participants for over a decade. From 2012-2016 he was a member of the Working Group on the Revision of CIOMS 2002 International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects. Prior to that he was an expert commentator at three World Medical Association meetings for the revision of the 2013 Declaration of Helsinki. Since 2007 he has been a member of the ethics working group of the U.S. HIV Prevention Trials Network where he was part of the group that drafted the HIV Prevention Trials Network Ethics Guidance for Research. From 2016-2017 he was part of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine Committee on Clinical Trials During the 2014-15 Ebola Outbreak and in 2016 he was appointed to the U.S. Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Blood and Tissue Safety and Availability. He has served as an ethics expert in consultations with numerous national and international organizations including U.S. National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization (here, and here), the World Medical Association (here, and here) and the World Bank.
Recent Publications
David Danks, Alex John London. (2017). Algorithmic Bias in Autonomous Systems. Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017). Forthcoming.
Adam Bjorndahl, Alex John London, Kevin J.S. Zollman. (2017) Kantian Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Dignity, Price, and Consistency. Philosopher's Imprint. Forthcoming.
Alex John London. (2017). Equipoise in Research: Integrating Ethics and Science in Human Research. JAMA 317(5):525-526. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.0016
David Danks, Alex John London. (2017). Regulating Autonomous Systems: Beyond Standards. IEEE Intelligent Systems. 32(1):88-91. doi:10.1109/MIS.2017.1
Alex John London and Jonathan Kimmelman. (2016). Accelerated Drug Approval and Health Inequality. JAMA Internal Medicine. Published online 13 June 2016. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.2534
Liza Dawson, Steffanie A. Strathdee, Alex John London, Kathryn E. Lancaster, Robert Klitzman, Irving Hoffman, Scott Rose, Jeremy Sugarman. (2016) Addressing Ethical Challenges in HIV Prevention Research with People who Inject Drugs. Journal of Medical Ethics. Published online 25 April, 2016. doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-10289.
Aidan Kestigian and Alex John London. (2016). Adversaries at the Bedside: Advance Care Plans and Future Welfare. Bioethics. Published online 23 May 2016. DOI:10.1111/bioe.12263
Frauke Hoss and Alex John London. (2015). Assessing the Moral Coherence and Robustness of Social Systems: Proof of Concept for a Graphical Models Approach. Science and Engineering Ethics Published online 21 December 25. DOI 10.1007/s11948-015-9743-0.
Alex John London. (2015) Research in a Public Health Crisis: The Integrative Approach to Managing The Moral Tensions. Emergency Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 220-261.
Alex John London, Jonathan Kimmelman. (2015). Why Clinical Translation Cannot Succeed Without Failing. eLife. 2015;4:e12844. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.12844.