Alfred I. (Fred) Tauber is the Zoltan Kohn Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences of Boston University. Having served as the Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University from 1993 to 2010, Fred has offered courses over a wide expanse of philosophy and history of science that range from 19th century positivism to 21st century bioethics. For the past six years, he has been a part-time Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University.
Fred served an internship and residency at the University of Washington Affiliated Hospitals, followed by advanced training at Tufts-New England Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, MIT, and the Robert B. Brigham Hospital. He spent four years on the faculty at Harvard Medical School before joining Boston University School of Medicine in 1982.
Aside from numerous research publications in biochemistry and cell biology, Fred has written extensively on 19th and 20th century biomedicine, contemporary science studies, and ethics. He is the author of The Immune Self, Theory or Metaphor? (Cambridge, 1994), Confessions of a Medicine Man, An Essay in Popular Philosophy (MIT, 1999), Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing (California, 2001), Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility (MIT, 2005), Science and the Quest for Meaning (Baylor, 2009), and Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher (Princeton, 2010). In 2008, he received the Science Medal from the University of Bologna for his critical studies of theoretical immunology.
Fred earned a B.S. from Tufts University in 1969 and an M.D. in 1973 from Tufts University School of Medicine. He was elected to the Tufts Board of Trustees in 2003.
Last updated: August 30, 2011
