27 Facts About Leon Kass

Leon Richard Kass was born on February 12,1939 and is an American physician, biochemist, educator, and public intellectual.

Leon Kass is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Senior Fellow Emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Dean of the Faculty at Shalem College in Jerusalem.

Leon Kass's books include Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs; The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature; Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics; The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis; and What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song.

Leon Kass was born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Leon Kass enrolled in the University of Chicago at age 15, graduating from the college with a degree in biology in 1958.

The college was well known for its extensive core curriculum, and Leon Kass studied the "great books" then prescribed by Chicago's core.

Around this time Leon Kass began to develop an interest in morality in medicine and in bio medical ethics, instigated partly as a result of reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

In 1961, Leon Kass married the former Amy Apfel, a fellow graduate of the College of the University of Chicago.

Amy Leon Kass died of complications from ovarian cancer and leukemia on August 19,2015.

Leon and Amy Kass went to Holmes County, Mississippi, during the summer of 1965 to do civil rights work.

In 1967, Leon Kass read an article by Joshua Lederberg in the Washington Post suggesting that humans could one day be cloned, permitting the perpetuation of the genotypes of geniuses.

At St John's, Leon Kass taught in the Great Books program as well as in-depth studies of Aristotle's De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics and Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

At the University of Chicago, Leon Kass taught courses across the humanities and sciences, including both undergraduate and graduate seminars in the Nicomachean Ethics, Plato's Symposium and Meno, Lucretius, human passions, science and society, Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Genesis, Darwinism, Descartes's Discourse on the Method, classical geometry, Tolstoy's War and Peace, marriage and courtship, Exodus, and biotechnology.

Leon Kass taught in and chaired this program for eighteen years.

Leon Kass won the University of Chicago's Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1983 and the Amoco Foundation Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching in 1993.

Leon Kass has tried to raise the public's consciousness of emerging technology's risks to values that humanity holds dear.

Leon Kass replied to these criticisms by saying that the council was more intellectually diverse than prior bioethics commissions precisely because it included opponents of abortion.

Leon Kass stepped down as chairman of the Council in October 2005 and remained a member of the council until 2007.

Leon Kass returned to positions at the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Chicago.

Leon Kass has been a consistent critic of embryo research, including embryonic stem cell research, because of its "exploitation" and "destruction" of nascent human life.

Leon Kass supports a universal ban on the cloning of humans on the grounds that cloning is an affront to morality and human dignity.

Leon Kass was an early critic of the widespread use of reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization, partly because he was concerned that their use obscures truths about the essence of human life and society that are embedded in the natural reproductive process.

For much of his career, Leon Kass's scholarship moved away from the practical issues of bioethics to issues of human nature and human good, and nearly all of his teaching at Chicago has been about these topics.

Leon Kass would "go into eclipse," and Leon Kass would "cease to be".

Leon Kass was named the 2009 Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Leon Kass has been given honorary degrees by the University of Dallas, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Carthage College, and Yeshiva University.

Leon Kass has two married daughters and four granddaughters; they reside in Chicago and Jerusalem.