Nancy M. P. King
        Professor

B.A., 1975, St. John's College; J.D., 1980, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  
    Professor King teaches legal, social, and ethical issues to medical students at UNC. Her scholarship focuses on bioethics and health law, with special concentration on roles and responsibilities in health care decisions, human subjects research ethics and policy, and “everyday ethics” issues. She has worked extensively on informed consent in health care and research, neonatal intensive care, the development and use of experimental technologies, international research ethics, and decision making at the end of life. Her approach to both teaching and scholarship is interdisciplinary, combining issues, approaches, literatures, and methods in order to promote critical reflection on questions of ethics and policy in health care and research.

Professor King was a member of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) of NIH from 1998-2002, and has since served on two RAC working groups, one on informed consent and one on clinical trial design. The Informed Consent Working Group produced a guidance document that serves as a comprehensive resource for investigators and IRBs.

As a result of this experience, her current work focuses on aspects of human genetic research that raise important conceptual and empirical questions. One such project addresses the discussion of benefit in human gene transfer research. This work, in collaboration with colleagues at UNC and elsewhere, is funded by the ELSI Program of NHGRI. Project materials and publications may be found on the project website, Benefit in Gene Transfer Research.

Another project examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of large-sample gene discovery and disclosure. This planning project is designed ultimately to establish a Center for Excellence in ELSI Research at UNC to address the ethical, legal, and social issues that arise when biological materials, DNA, and genetic information are collected, stored, and used in research. This project also involves faculty in the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences.

Professor King serves on UNC Hospitals’ Ethics Committee and on the UNC School of Medicine’s Biomedical IRB. A revised edition of her book, Making Sense of Advance Directives, was published by Georgetown University Press in 1996. She is co-editor, with two UNC colleagues, of Beyond Regulations: Ethics in Human Subjects Research (UNC Press 1999). She is also a co-editor of The Social Medicine Reader (Duke University Press 1997), a collection of readings drawn from the Department’s long experience in multidisciplinary teaching about the complex relationships between illness and health care and the larger society. A revised three-volume edition of the Reader is in press.

Curriculum Vitae

You may contact Professor King by email: nmpking@med.unc.edu; by phone at: (919) 843-8270; or by post at: CB #7240, Department of Social Medicine / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill / Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7240.
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