Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/308706
t m c ยป p u l s e | m a y 7, 2 0 1 4 26 Q | Tell us a bit about your formative years? A | My parents grew up on Long Island in New York, and I was born while my dad was in medical school in Brooklyn. He's an ophthalmologist, and we moved to Florida after he completed his fellowship at Johns Hopkins when I was about five years old. I grew up in Jupiter, Florida. My mom was a therapist and I had an older brother and a younger sister. I lived in Florida through high school, and then I left to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied psychology. I was also very interested in cultural anthropol- ogy as an undergraduate. Q | What triggered your interest in cultural anthropology? A | In college I became very interested in different cultural belief systems. I spent a semester in Australia studying aboriginal studies, and I was also inter- ested in Native American studies and the spiritual beliefs held by different cultures. I ended up, towards the end of college, working with a newly formed NPO called DreamChange. It was led by a man named John Perkins, who had done work in the 1960s when he was in the Peace Corps, in South America and Ecuador, and he had become close to the indigenous populations down there. He started leading trips throughout Ecuador to study the belief systems of the indigenous populations and the healing practices of the local shamans. I joined the DreamChange organi- zation and started leading trips myself, for approximately a year, between college and law school. After I started law school I lost touch with the orga- nization, but I recently reconnected with John and this has come full circle because I was recently asked to join the board of directors of DreamChange. aMy l. McguIRe, J.d., ph.d., leon Jaworski professor of biomedical ethics and director of baylor college of medicine's center for medical ethics and health policy, sat down with texas medical center chief strategy and operating officer and executive vice president william f. mckeon to talk about the ethics of genomics research, and the future of health policy. TMC SPOTLigHT The organization is now committed to educating educators, business leaders, and individuals, using some of the shamanistic principles, to shift the way modern societies value each other and the planet and to create a more sustain- able world. Q | How does your work with DreamChange tie into your interest in medical ethics? A | Through my work with DreamChange I became very inter- ested in complementary and alternative medicine, and the ethics and regula- tions around different healing modal- ities in the United States and abroad. I decided to enroll in a J.D., Ph.D. program that was focused on health law and the medical humanities. While in law school I did a little work on the ethics and regulation of complemen- tary and alternative medicine but then became interested in other areas during my Ph.D. A couple years ago, I had an opportunity to return to that early inter- est and taught an undergraduate course at Rice on the Ethics and Regulation of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which was really fun for me, but other than that I haven't really done much scholarship in that area. Q | Do you have any mentors? A | I think we all have mentors, in different ways. As an undergraduate at Penn, one of my mentors was Martin Seligman, who at the time was develop- ing the concept of learned helplessness and the role of optimism and pessi- mism in depression. I did my under- graduate thesis in that area. While I was working with him, he started to shift his interest towards positive psychol- ogy, which is what he focuses on now, and we had some really engaging discussions about positive psychology,