A bioethicist of all trades

In the back of Penn's 1998 Undergraduate Course Guide, the Notable Quotable section includes several anonymous student comments about Paul Root Wolpe, an above-average Sociology professor.

"If Wolpe donates to a sperm bank, I'm the first in line. He's the man!" one comment reads.

"I want to major in Wolpe," another awestruck student wrote.

And these are just two of the Sociology and Psychology professor's adoring fans.

The popular Wolpe is best known, however, for his expertise in the field of bioethics. At Penn, he is a faculty associate at the Center for Bioethics. And last April, he was appointed the first chief bioethicist at NASA.

Besides traveling across the country to lecture on bioethics, Wolpe publishes numerous articles and does consultations for doctors, fellow professors and anyone else who wants to pick his brain.

Sitting in his office at the Center for Bioethics, he yawns at one point, apologizes and says he's very tired, running on approximately six hours of sleep every night.

"I also don't get enough sleep," he says with a smile.

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One of the personality traits Arthur Caplan, Center for Bioethics director, admires in Wolpe, besides his energy and sense of humor, is his appreciation for family.

"Paul takes his home life very seriously," Caplan said. "He listens to his spouse, his daughters. He'll come into the office with a story from his father. He's not a person who lives in two separate worlds -- work and home. They're together as one with him."

A prime example of that came a few years ago, when The Wizard of Oz was rereleased in movie theaters. Wolpe took his daughters, Ariel, 13, and Kendra, 10, to see the movie.

But he didn't have Dorothy and Toto on his mind.

At the time, he was working on a speech about death and dying. So when the Wicked Witch of the West was crushed under the house, a bell went off in Wolpe's head.

In the movie, The Mayor of Munchkin City is told that people had to see if the witch was "morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably dead." Wolpe chuckled at first, but then he realized that despite appearances, this was an adult subject -- how can it be determined if someone is "undeniably and reliably dead," he wondered.

When Wolpe delivered his talk, he used The Wizard of Oz as an organizing schema and included clips of the movie -- which he had quickly burned onto a DVD -- bringing his topic to life and winning over the audience.

Wolpe seems to have a knack for putting new twists on more traditional ideas. Nothing is ordinary for him.

Take his way of blowing the shofar, the Jewish ritual instrument made of a ram's horn.

Wolpe doesn't just blow the shofar in the standard, accepted way on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He plays the jazz shofar, riffing away on the ram's horn at family get-togethers and Bar and Bat mitzvahs of friends' children.

"I don't know how to describe the sound in prose," Wolpe said. "The first moment you put the shofar up to your lips and start to play, the looks on peoples' faces is delight."

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For someone who works in the business of outer space, Wolpe is incredibly down-to-earth.

He graduated from Penn in 1979 after living in the Quad for the whole of his undergraduate career -- all five years. Wolpe says he was not smart enough to graduate in four.

Hard to believe for a man who was one of the first Penn students to create an individualized major, the social psychology of religion, earn a Ph.D. in the sociology of medicine from Yale in 1987 under a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and become one of the premiere bioethicists in the country.

He's quoted in newspapers across the country, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and makes television appearances on MSNBC, CNN and "CBS News."

But being in the public eye is not anything new for this native Philadelphian whose father was a rabbi of a large congregation.

"What p.k.'s -- that's preachers' kids -- will tell you, being a child of a clergyman, you grow up in a public way," he said. "The public has never been nerve-racking."

Wolpe's close relationship with his parents is one reason he has remained within the Penn community.

While he was working on his Ph.D. at Yale, his mother suffered a stroke. Wolpe left New Haven and returned to Philly to be with his mother and help his father. He decided to complete the Ph.D. at Penn, even though he had already applied for jobs that he was forced to turn down.

He asked a Penn professor whom he knew from his days at Yale if she had any openings to teach in the Sociology department. Wolpe planned on staying for one year.

Fifteen years later, he's still at the University.

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For Wolpe -- who identifies himself not as a "hedgehog academic" who specializes in only one area, but rather as a "fox academic" who dives into many unrelated areas -- choosing what to eliminate from his busy schedule is the challenge.

"The hardest question for me, by far, is deciding which of the many, many things I'm interested in I will put my time into," Wolpe said.

He makes time, however, to serve the University outside of the classroom and the office. He sits on several committees including the Penn Hillel Committee and the Twenty-First Century Committee, which provides scholarships for medical students.

But most of his day is spent wrestling with some of the most challenging ethical questions of modern times.

Right now, he's working on an article on cognitive neuroscience and the issue of enhancement drugs. He's looking at people who take drugs such as Prozac, Viagra or Ritalin for non-medical purposes to improve mental performance.

The issue of memory enhancement also intrigues Wolpe. Scientists are working on a drug for Alzheimer's patients that enhances their memory.

Noticing that chess is listed as an official Olympic sport, Wolpe wonders if this memory enhancing drug will be banned for Olympic chess players just as Olympic athletes are prohibited from using steroids. He says he fears that people will abuse the new drugs.

"We don't know what it means to enhance our memories," Wolpe said. "There are things that our brains intentionally forget. It could be that our brains have exactly the right amount of memory capacity."

It is exactly this kind of research that excites Wolpe, who says he might not have stuck around had it not been for the creation of the Center for Bioethics in 1994. Wolpe was one of the first faculty members at the center, beginning his tenure there in 1995.

"Working at the center is exactly what I wanted to do," he says. "It's interdisciplinary -- we have lawyers, philosophers, doctors. It's collaborative -- people work together here on projects. The content of what we do here is what I'm interested in."

The center is one of the leading institutions of bioethics in the country. Caplan describes it as an intersection point where people from different fields can gather to discuss ethical and social questions about healthcare.

Wolpe says he loves engaging in dialogue with his colleagues, arguing over the benefits of cloning, managed healthcare, medical privacy and alternative and complimentary medicines, such as herbal remedies.

But those debates are not enough. They are just the starting point.

"I really deeply believe in having this conversation as a society," Wolpe said. "These are not issues that people like me should decide in offices like these as self-appointed guardians of public morality. These are societal issues that the public needs to talk about."

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