Dr. Margaret Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor of Law, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and Founding Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, Montreal.

She has an extensive national and international publishing and speaking record and is a frequent commentator in all forms of media.

She authored The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit (Penguin 2000); Death Talk: The Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (MQUP 2002); and The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (Anansi 2006), which she delivered as the nationally broadcast CBC 2006 Massey Lectures. She has edited Do We Care? Renewing Canada’s Commitment to Health (MQUP 1999) and co-edited Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge (MQUP/EOLSS 2000).

Professor Somerville regularly consults, nationally and internationally, to a wide variety of bodies including governments and NGO’s. She has received many honours and awards including the Order of Australia, six honorary doctorates and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

In 2003 she was chosen by an international jury as the first recipient of the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science.