James F. Childress is the John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. He was born in North Carolina, and studied at Guilford and Yale. He held the position of research chair at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown, and has been actively involved in several national committees examining bioethics and public policy. He was vice chair of the national Task Force on Organ Transplantation and served on the Board of Directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, and the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, among others. He was appointed by President Clinton to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission from 1996-2001. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Hastings Center. He is the co-author (with Tom L. Beauchamp) of Principles of Bioethics, and has authored several books and numerous articles on biomedical ethics, and other topics within the field of ethics.