Jacob S. Sherkow

About

Jacob Sherkow is a law professor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, focusing on intellectual property and medical therapies, agency regulation, and the legal and ethical issues attendant to advanced biotechnologies. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 articles and essays, two books on COVID-19 innovation policy, four book chapters, and many op-eds. His work explores how the structuring of property and regulatory regimes can produce the best medicines for the most people, often using case studies to reveal situations where scientific practice is misaligned with legal rules or the realities of litigation. Sherkow's recent research was funded through a grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore legal improvements to genomic privacy and security technologies developed at Illinois. He holds faculty appointments at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the European Union Center, and has advised major scientific organizations on bioethical issues. In 2018, he was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine Scholar and currently serves as an academic advisor to the academy’s Committee on Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation. Sherkow routinely advises governments and commercial entities on patents and biotechnology, including counseling investment firms, engaging with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, working with the World Health Organization, and advising the French National…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Biology
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Law
• Engineering ethics
• Environmental science
• Environmental resource management
• Public relations
• Ecology

Selected publications

• The Earth BioGenome Project 2020: Starting the clock

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 362 citations

  Description

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Self-experimentation, ethics, and regulation of vaccines

  Science · 2020-09-17 · 39 citations

  articleOpen access

  DIY COVID-19 vaccines raise legal and ethical questions

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ethical, legal, and social issues in the Earth BioGenome Project

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022-01-18 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is an audacious endeavor to obtain whole-genome sequences of representatives from all eukaryotic species on Earth. In addition to the project's technical and organizational challenges, it also faces complicated ethical, legal, and social issues. This paper, from members of the EBP's Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) Committee, catalogs these ELSI concerns arising from EBP. These include legal issues, such as sample collection and permitting; the applicabi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Handle with Care: The WHO Report on Human Genome Editing

  The Hastings Center Report · 2022-03-01 · 19 citations

  article

  The World Health Organization's recent Report on Human Genome Editing departs from similar reports from other institutions in that it recognizes that ethical assessments of the technology are deeply complex, surprisingly fragile, and subject to practical and political considerations. The WHO report largely recommends that human genome editing, rather than being accepted in some circumstances and banned in others, should be handled with care. The report recommends some oversight mechanisms-such a…

  PublisherDOI

• Telehealth and Mobile Health: Case Study for Understanding and Anticipating Emerging Science and Technology

  NAM Perspectives · 2023-11-15 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eli Y. Adashi

  Brown University

  49 shared

• I. Glenn Cohen

  Harvard University

  42 shared

• Henry T. Greely

  Stanford University

  30 shared

• Christopher Thomas Scott

  Baylor College of Medicine

  20 shared

• Patricia J. Zettler

  The Ohio State University

  19 shared

• Marie‐Paule Lefranc

  18 shared

• Robert Cook‐Deegan

  Arizona State University

  17 shared

• Debra Mathews

  16 shared

Education

• J.D., Law

  University of Michigan

• B.Sc., Biology

  McGill University

• M.A., Biology

  Columbia University

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Maria T. Grosse Perdekamph-141
• James Liuh-110
• Jin H. Ahnh-88