Additional Information

Teaching:

Iain teaches on the campus-based and distance-learning postgraduate degrees in Healthcare Ethics and Law; he is also Course Director and lead teacher for the undergraduate Philosophy of Law module, and supervises PhD students in ethics-related fields.

He is currently coming to the end of his seventh year of what was supposed to be a three-year appointment as Exams Officer for law.

Media:

Iain is a requent contributor to media debates in the UK and further afield, having appeared several times on national and international TV and radio news programmes, and has been quoted in Newsweek, the Financial Times, Daily Mail, and Guardian, The Hindu, among others

Media availability in bioethics, applied ethics, and medical law.

Iain received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Birmingham in 2003.  Before that, he received an MSc with Distinction in Health Care Ethics from Birmingham (1999), and a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Hull (1998). He taught at the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele from 2003-2006 and at Keele Medical School in 2004-5; he has also taught in the Medical School at Birmingham in various roles between 1998 and 2003, and at the Philosophy Department at Warwick.  He came to Manchester in 2006; he became a senior lecturer in 2014 and was given a Chair in 2024.

• Ethics and genetic technology
• Ethics and law at the end of life
• Jurisprudence, and the relationship between ethics and law
• Moral theory

Current Research Projects:

Iain's research portfolio is diverse, covering topics from the beginning of life to its end, taking small things like the nature of justice and rights en route. Recent papers have dealt with the nature of putative rights to inherit or bequeath property, with the relationship between medical ethics and medical law, with the use of sleep-regulating drugs, and with legislation on assisted dying.  The Private Life of the Genome, a book about the nature and extent of privacy rights over genetic information, was published in May 2023.  (Spoiler: we'd probably be better of accepting that there really are no such rights, and working out who should have how much access to what on some other basis.  It may even be that we could do away with talking about rights full stop, but that's going to need another book to sort out.)

From 2026, he will be a participant in the Writing Life project, an international collaboration looking at the ethics and regulation of synthetic DNA technologies.