Jonathan Kimmelman

Bioethics

When a new drug is being developed, after preclinical trials and animal testing, the moment comes when the substance is supposed to be tested on healthy people in a first-in-human study. This whole process raises ethical questions: Is the potential danger to healthy probands justified when they themselves derive no therapeutic benefit? Are the data from animal experiments or cell cultures reliable enough? How can animal testing be minimised? What risks are acceptable? 

Jonathan Kimmelman combines philosophical analysis with empirical research. He addresses ethical problems in translational research, especially the transition from laboratory experiments to initial human trials. He calls for “moral efficiency” by which he means that medical research is ethically justified when it generates the most reliable and useful knowledge possible whilst posing the least possible risk and inconvenience to the test subjects. A study may have been given formal ethical approval and still be morally inefficient, for example if it is badly planned, too modest in scope or replicates known errors. In a highly regarded article during the COVID pandemic, Kimmelman warned about loosening scientific standards under time pressure. He argued that moral efficiency was even more important during crises as a vast number of badly coordinated studies would waste resources and reinforce uncertainty. 

Kimmelman’s visionary research is meant to strengthen the ethics and efficiency of biomedical research in Germany and Europe in the long term and to advance its conceptual and methodological development. Within the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité, he is invited to assume a Humboldt Professorship for Ethics, Policy and Meta-Research at the BIH QUEST Center for Responsible Research.

Brief bio

Jonathan Kimmelman is a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Before specialising in bioethics, he took a doctorate in biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University, United States. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and, since 2018, has held a James McGill Professorship which honours outstanding original researchers for being international pioneers in their fields. In 2014, he was granted a Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 

Jonathan Kimmelman has been selected for a Humboldt Professorship and is currently conducting appointment negotiations with the German university that nominated him for the award. If the negotiations end successfully, the award will be granted in 2027.