Sigrid Fry-Revere

Fry-Revere earned her BA with honors in both government and philosophy at Smith College in 1983 and went on to earn her Masters in Jurisprudence at Georgetown University in 1984. She completed a joint degree program at Georgetown, receiving her J.D. in 1988 and Ph.D. in philosophy in 1990. While at Georgetown University Law Center, she was the executive editor of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics for its inaugural issue and projects editor for The Georgetown Criminal Law Review. In 1991, Fry-Revere went on to become a post-graduate clinical fellow at the University of Virginia Hospital.[1]

Fry-Revere worked as an attorney, practicing bioethics, health, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration law with the law firm of Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn. She worked as an adjunct professor of ethics and healthcare law at George Mason University College of Nursing and Health Science and as an associate professor at the University of Virginia Center for Biomedical Ethics.[2] She has also consulted for hospitals, hospices, and home health agencies. She formerly served as Director of Bioethics Studies at the Cato Institute.[3]

In 2008, Fry-Revere became the founder and president of the Center for Ethical Solutions, an organization that educated the public on critical issues in patient-care ethics. In 2013, she founded Stop Organ Trafficking Now which lobbied the government and educated the public on how to increase organ donation in the U.S. and reduce the number of Americans who turn to illegally trafficked organs to try to save their lives. Fry-Revere became the founder and president of the American Living Organ Donor Fund in 2014. Her discoveries working with U.S. organ donors led to an NPR American Life Segment (2016), a TEDx in 2017, and a lead article: "Solving the Organ Shortage by Giving Organ Donors What They Deserve" in the Journal of Hospital Ethics (Vol 5, No. 1, Winter 2018). She left the ALODF in 2018 because of mission drift and joined Kid-U-Not Living Organ Donor Fund as its executive director. Kid-U-Not is exclusively focused on providing grants to living organ donors to help them with their non-medical organ donation related expenses.

Fry-Revere has served as a medical ethicist on the Washington Regional Transplant Community Organ and Tissue Advisory Committee (2008-2018). WRTC is the Organ Procurement Organization (from deceased donors) for Washington, DC and neighboring regions in Maryland and Virginia.[4] Prior, she was a consultant to the Arlington Hospital, Virginia (1995-1996) as well as a consultant to the VNA Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (1994-1995). She was also a bioethics consultant to the Virginia Bioethics Network at the University of Virginia (1993-1994).[5]

Fry-Revere has written four books, the most recent of which is The Kidney Sellers: A Journey of Discovery in Iran (2014)[6] which resulted in a TEDMED talk given at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 2014. Her research in Iran also resulted in two academic articles, "Coercion, dissatisfaction, and social stigma: an ethnographic study of compensated living kidney donation in Iran" in International Urology and Nephrology 1-12 (March 2018), and "Introducing an Exploitation/Fair Dealings Scale for Evaluating Living Organ Donor Policies Using Iran as the Test Case" in World Medical and Health Policy (May 2018).[7] Her article "Where’s the Safety Net?" appeared on the front page of the Huffington Post[8] (June 2016) and "Between Scylla and Charybdis: Charting an Ethical Course for Research into Financial Incentives for Living Kidney Donation" was published in The American Journal of Transplantation (February 2016).

She has also written Defining Death: A New Legal Perspective (2014), Ethics & Answers in Home Health Care: A Practical Guide for Dealing with Bioethical Issues in Your Organization (1995), and The Accountability of Bioethics Committees and Consultants (1992). To books edited by others she contributed “Terminally Ill Patients Should Be Allowed to Use Experimental Drugs” (Prescription Drugs, 2008); “Federal Money and Oversight for Stem Cell Research” (Should the Government Fund Embryonic Stem Cell Research?, 2009); and "Bioethics Consultation Services" (BioLaw).[9]