A. For the most part, they want to help. There have been some who, in some situations, have refused. They are covered by something called the Common Rule, which includes the right to withdraw from an experiment at any time or to refuse to participate, without penalty  as any human research subject in the United States would be.

Astronauts have refused experiments that interfered with their getting enough sleep while in space  it’s very hard to sleep in microgravity. Others opted out because they were concerned that medical information collected on them couldn’t really be private and might interfere with their getting health insurance after retirement. But on a flight with seven people, if one opts out, you’ve cut your research population significantly. This led an advisory panel to suggest a “modification of the interpretation” of the Common Rule for astronauts.

I thought that the Common Rule was our most basic protection for human research subjects and said it was a mistake to erode it. I recommended that what NASA should do is continue to increase something they’d already started to do  involve the astronauts in every level of the research process. For a reasonable concern like health insurance, I suggested that NASA offer lifetime insurance to the astronauts, which they are trying to now do. It’s a comparatively low-cost way to solve a problem. To this date, there’s been no modification of interpretation of the Common Rule for astronauts.

Q. WHAT WAS THE MOST UNUSUAL QUESTION NASA HAS POSED TO YOU?

A. It wasn’t an ethical question, it was a religious one. My father, the late Gerald Wolpe, was a rabbi, as are two of my brothers. There had been an Israeli on the crew of the Columbia shuttle. After it broke up, NASA wanted to know about Jewish religious standards in regard to gathering and interring remains. NASA teams were recovering pieces of bodies on the ground in Texas and Louisiana, much of it unidentifiable. And NASA wanted to know if the Israeli government would want only Ilan Ramon’s flesh returned to it because, if so, NASA would have to do genotyping of every piece of tissue. That would take months.

I told them there were countervailing values. In Judaism you bury the body as soon as possible. I didn’t think the Israelis would want to have months and months pass.

I’ve since heard that a lot of the tissue buried in the various graves of these astronauts was unidentified. There’s something touching that some of what is buried in each of their resting places is tissue from all of them.

Q. DID YOUR BECOMING A BIOETHICIST HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOUR FATHER’S WORK?

A. I think so. He was very involved in bioethics, even before it was a recognized field of study. He taught a course about death and dying at a medical school. At a time when there were few dialysis machines for people with kidney disease, he was on a state commission to decide who could get priority access to them. All of that came home in 1986, when my mother had a stroke and he became her primary caregiver. It made the whole family even more aware of the stresses caregivers suffer.

I was in graduate school at the time this happened, studying medical sociology. But I could see that this new field, bioethics, was rapidly developing. It combined everything I loved: medicine, the life sciences and the ethics I’d grown up with. For me, it was the perfect fit.