Research Overview
Inmaculada de Melo-Martin, PhD, MS, is Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Medical Ethics, Weill Cornell Medical College. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a M.S. in Molecular Biology. Her research interests include Bioethics and Philosophy of Science. Most of her work has been on ethical and epistemological issues related to reprogenetics and molecular genetics. She is the author of Making Babies: Biomedical Technology, Reproductive Ethics, and Public Policy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), and Taking Biology Seriously: What Biology Can and Cannot Tell Us About Moral and Public Policy Issues (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Her work has been published in journals such as Academic Medicine, American Journal of Bioethics, Bioethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, The FASEB Journal, Fertility and Sterility, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, The Lancet, Philosophy of Science, The Journal of Medical Ethics, and The Oncologist.
Her latest research project, in which she evaluates the claim that biotechnologies pose a threat to human dignity, has been funded by the National Science Foundation. She assesses the ways in which the concept of human dignity is used in current debates about contentious biotechnologies such as human genetic enhancement, the creation of human-nonhuman chimeras, and embryonic stem cell research.
