Glenn McGee
Photo by glennandmonica at Flickr

When Glenn McGee founded the Alden March Bioethics Institute (AMBI) at Albany Medical College in New York State in 2005, magazine articles and newspaper stories hailed the arrival of the man once described as "Socrates with a beeper." Now, a month after his abrupt departure, former colleagues are painting a complex portrait that suggests the ethicist's own personal and professional relationships may have led to the institute's undoing.

McGee remains a tenured professor at AMBI, and neither he nor college officials will discuss the circumstances surrounding his change in status. Former colleagues, however, say the institute began to unravel shortly after his arrival when Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., severed its longtime educational partnership with AMBI's parent medical school and as disillusioned faculty—accusing the ethicist of everything from forgery to spreading insulting rumors—left.

McGee's rise to academic and media prominence came at a time when bioethicists were increasingly in demand to comment on high-profile medical cases such as the one involving Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was removed in 2005 after 15 years in a persistent vegetative state. The idea of "Socrates with a beeper" would make some bioethicists cringe but McGee, a 40-year-old Texan with two iPhones, appeared to crave the spotlight. He counts himself lucky to have published his first book, The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetics, in 1997* just when scientists in Scotland announced they had cloned Dolly the sheep—and ethics experts were in hot demand to weigh in on the controversial procedure. "I believe that talking to the public is a good thing," McGee says. "Are [some bioethicists] bothered by that? Of course, they are."

Other ethicists, however, applauded McGee for raising the profile of their growing field. "He's certainly one of the most important bioethicists of his generation," says Autumn Fiester, an ethicist and former colleague at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics in Philadelphia, where McGee served as associate director for education for nine years before taking the Albany position.

McGee had a knack for being ahead of the game, launching a bioethics Web site back in 1994. The site today is the blog for the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), which McGee co-founded in 2001 with David Magnus, an ethicist at Stanford University. In this unusual journal, articles submitted for consideration were posted to a private forum online for member comment; the article and all discussion about it would then be published in the print issue. It provided a trendy alternative to the more established The Hastings Center Report, published by the nearly 40-year-old Hastings Center in Garrison, N.Y., which is considered to be the most influential journal in the field. The old-school Report did not launch its own Web site until two years ago.

"I took some big risks from a career standpoint," AJOB editor in chief, McGee, says of his efforts to modernize and promote the field, "that obviously made me some friends and enemies." He and his co-editors apparently stoked a rivalry between their fledgling journal and the venerable Hastings Center Report by comparing the number of times bioethicists cited each publication in their various journal articles. McGee does not deny this, noting that "when you have two journals in bioethics that overlap in audiences, you are going to have some competition."