Norman Fost, MD, MPH
Norman Fost, MD, MPH, is a graduate of Princeton (AB 1960), Yale (MD 1964) and Harvard (MPH 1973). He completed residency training in pediatrics and two years as chief resident at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was a fellow in the Harvard Program in Law, Medicine and Ethics in 1972-1973. Since 1973, he has been at the University of Wisconsin, where he is professor of pediatrics and bioethics; vice chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics; and director of the Program in Medical Ethics, which he founded in 1973. He also works as a general pediatrician and a member of the Child Protection Team. Since 1977, he has been chair of the Hospital Ethics Committee and the Health Sciences Institutional Review Board. He was director of the Pediatric Residency Training Program for 21 years, head of the Child Protection Team from 1973 to 2006 and vice chair of the Department of Pediatrics from 1985 to 1995. In 1996-1997, he was the DeCamp Visiting Professor of Bioethics at Princeton.
Dr. Fost was awarded the Nellie Westermann Prize for Research Ethics in 1997. He was an elected member of the Princeton University Board of Trustees (1994-1998), and in 2003 was awarded the William G. Bartholome Award for Excellence in Ethics by the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 2006, he received a lifetime achievement award, created by the DHHS Office of Human Research Protection, for his work in the protection of human subjects in research. In 2007, he was named the first winner of the Patricia Price Browne Award in Bioethics.
Dr. Fost has extensive experience in ethical and policy issues in genetic screening. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committees that published the reports "Genetic Screening" (1975) and "Assessing Genetic Risk" (1994). He chaired the Office of Technology Assessment Committee on Cystic Fibrosis Screening (1991), co-chaired the American Society of Human Genetics Committee on Insurance Issues (1992), was a member of the ASHG Committee on CF Population Screening and the NIH Workshop on CF Heterozygote Screening (1992) and presently is chair of the Ethics and Security Advisory Board for the Marshfield Personalized Medicine Research Project. He was co-investigator of the Wisconsin Newborn Screening Study of Pre-Symptomatic Treatment of Cystic Fibrosis, and in 1994 was a member of President Clinton's Health Care Task Force.