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Daniel Sokol (born August 6, 1978, in Puyricard, France) is a medical ethicist known for his academic and journalistic writings on the ethics of medicine. He lectures nationally and internationally, and writes regularly for BBC News Online.

In 2007, Sokol founded and directed the UK’s first course in applied clinical ethics (ACE) for clinicians, based at Imperial College London (1). He is a Council member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (2), the UK Ministry of Defence’s Research Ethics Committee, the Institute of Medical Ethics, the Imperial NHS Trust Clinical Ethics Committee, the St George’s NHS Trust Clinical Ethics Committee, the Royal College of Surgeons’ Working Party on Clinical Laryngeal Transplantation, and the Association of Anaesthetists’ Working Party on Needlestick Injuries. He is also the first non-clinical Honorary Secretary of the Osler Club of London.

BIOGRAPHY

Educated in France until the age of 11, Sokol attended Winchester College before studying Linguistics and French Literature at Oxford University (St Edmund Hall). It is as an undergraduate at Oxford that he won the 3rd Oxfordshire Science Writing competition in 1999. After successive academic scholarships at St Edmund Hall, he received his BA (1st class) in 2001 and obtained a Wellcome Trust Award to study a Master’s in Social and Economic History (specializing in the History of Medicine) at Green College, Oxford. Intrigued by the ethical dimensions of medicine, he studied for a Master’s in Medical Ethics at Imperial College London and, under the supervision of Professor Raanan Gillon and Dr Tim Rhodes, completed a PhD in the subject (“Truth-telling and benignly intended deception in the doctor-patient relationship: a philosophical and empirical analysis”), also funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Following his PhD, he obtained a Lectureship in Ethics at Keele University. He is currently a Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Law at St George’s, University of London, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.

WORK

Sokol is perhaps best known for his support for the introduction of professional clinical ethicists in British hospitals, his argument that doctors have a strong but not absolute duty of care in times of virulent epidemics, and his views on the moral permissibility of clinicians deceiving patients in rare circumstances (3,4,5).

In 2005, Sokol co-authored, with Dr Gillian Bergson, an award-winning textbook on medical ethics and law for students (6). Since 2007, he has written a regular column (‘Ethics Man’) for the British Medical Journal. It is in this column that Sokol has called for the inclusion of medical history in contemporary medical education (“surely every student worth their stethoscope should be familiar with the bare bones of the subjects”) (7), pointed out the dishonesty (and its moral wrongs) of candidates applying for medical jobs (8), decried the injustice of gift authorship in scientific publications (9), questioned the validity of current professional guidelines on confidentiality (10), illustrated, through an account of visiting a patient suffering from motor neurone disease, what he deems to be the ‘essence of medicine’(11), warned of the dangers of conflating law and ethics (12), defended the morality of assisted suicide (13), called for greater involvement of doctors in medical ethics (14), introduced the idea of an ethics checklist to be used in hospital ward rounds (15), and supported the adoption of the phrase ‘Allow Natural Death’ to replace ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ (16).

He has been a Visiting Scholar in Bioethics at Washington Hospital Center, Washington DC, and Portland St Vincent Hospital, Oregon. He is the International Contributing Editor for the Journal of Hospital Ethics, and Associate Editor of the Postgraduate Medical Journal and BioMedCentral Medical Ethics.

PERSONAL

In his personal life, Sokol is a semi-professional magician and a competitive chess player (17). He has three brothers (André, Georges and Charlie) who also live in London. He is the son of Ronald P. Sokol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Sokol) and Junko Sokol.

References

1)	Applied Clinical Ethics, Imperial College London (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/cpd/courses/subject/medical/ace) 2)	Committee on Publication Ethics, Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Publication_Ethics 3)	‘Meeting the ethical needs of doctors’, British Medical Journal (2005), vol. 330, p.741. 4)	‘Virulent epidemics and scope of healthcare workers’ duty of care’ (2006), Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 12, num. 8. Available from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol12no08/06-0360.htm 5)	‘Can deceiving patients be morally acceptable’, British Medical Journal (2007), vol. 334, pp. 984-986. 6)	‘Medical ethics and law; surviving on the wards and passing exams’ (2005), London: Trauma Publishing (ISBN: 0-954-76571-0) 7)	‘Ethics man: a perforated education’, British Medical Journal (2007), vol. 335, p. 1186. 8)	‘Ethics man: how far would you go?’, British Medical Journal (2008), vol. vol. 336, p. 190. 9)	‘Ethics man: the dilemma of authorship’, British Medical Journal (2008), vol. 336, p. 478. 10)	‘Ethics man: a crisis of confidence’, British Medical Journal (2008), vol. 336, p. 639. 11)	‘Ethics man: the essence of medicine’, British Medical Journal (2008), vol. 336, p. 1