Ezekiel Emanuel

For months, my parents had been trying to prepare me for the arrival of a real sibling. They had given me a doll to play with and encouraged me to take care of her. And when the baby, a little boy they named Rahm, finally arrived, they encouraged me to help take care of him, too.

The assumption should be that we will not appear in print or the blogosphere. Having dinner should not be fodder for Facebook. And this is just as true for 'public personalities' as it is for the average person. After all, even people in the public eye have a right to a private life.

When my children were growing up, we began every family meal - which included breakfast and dinner every day - with a prayer. We are Jewish and so it was the prayer over bread, when we were having bread, or the catch-all prayer for everything when we weren't.

Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago.

Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.

I'm the son of a pediatrician, and I do believe that the most important resource we have is our kids. And I think the most important thing for America's future is to invest more in our children.

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.

The president recognizes that funding global health is good for national security, domestic health and global diplomacy. Consequently, President Obama has steadily increased funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which was created by President Bush and has strong bipartisan support.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

I am not sure precisely why we need to have privacy, but everyone knows for sure that we need to relax and not have to put on our social, outwardly looking face all of the time.

My mother saw nothing inconsistent in her traditional desire to look after her husband and children and her radical politics. She began her civil rights work before most people had ever heard the word 'feminism,' and in those early years, she was focused on racial justice.

In the time when my mother began standing up against prejudice and racism, the vast majority of white Americans rarely thought about civil rights.

Where I came from, just nodding and smiling when someone expressed views was the ultimate insult. If people weren't yelling about politics in our house then they were arguing about music, or movies, or food.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many parents were generally standoffish with their male children and acted as if they were raising a generation of would-be soldiers. I remember some of my friends' parents who would shake their children's hands at bedtime.

Our dad hugged us and kissed us so much that some friends and relatives complained that he was going to turn us into sissies or homosexuals. But my dad didn't care. Let them raise their kids in a reserved and reticent way. He grew up in Israel, and his boys were going to be hugged and kissed by their father and know they were loved.

The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.

It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.

Anyone who lives in Washington and has an official position viscerally understands the cost of a lack of privacy. Every dinner - especially ones with a journalist in attendance - is preceded by the mandatory, 'This is off the record.' But everyone also knows, nothing is really 'off the record.'

Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.

By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life.

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don't have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it's a very difficult conversation. It's emotionally draining.

As an academic, what do you have? You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it.

We're all on a continuous journey to try and fix our mistakes and flaws. And, believe me, I've got plenty of them.

Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life... Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.

We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.