Hard To Believe will have the Australian Premiere in Sydney on August 3rd, 2016, from 6:45 PM to 9:00 PM (AEST), including a Q&A panel discussion.
Guest speakers:
MC / Q&A Panel Chair - Leigh Dayton
Leigh Dayton is an award-winning writer and broadcaster, specialising in the impact of developments in science, technology, environment and medicine on news and current events. For over 25 years, she has worked as a newspaper and magazine reporter and columnist, as well as a radio and television producer and on-air personality.
Opening addresses by:
Dr Sev Ozdowski AM, President of the Australian Council for Human Rights Education, Chair of The Australian Multicultural Council, Director of Equity and Diversity at the UWS, and former Human Rights Commissioner (2000 - 2005)
Nathan Kennedy, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights (ALHR)
Guest speakers on the panel:
Ethan Gutmann - Award-winning China analyst and human-rights investigator (featured in the film)
Prof. Jacob Lavee (via video call) - President of the Israel Transplantation Society, Director of the Heart Transplantation Unit and Deputy Director of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at the Leviev Heart Center of the Sheba Medical Center and Professor of Surgery at the Tel Aviv University Sackler Faculty of Medicine in Israel (featured in the film - 3rd Aug only)
Prof. Maria Fiatarone Singh - Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences and Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney, Medical Advisory Board Member of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting
Prof. Wendy Rogers - Professor of Clinical Ethics, Deputy Director of the Macquarie University Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics
For detailed speaker biographies please scroll down.
Venue address:
Event Cinemas, George Street - 525 George Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia (map)
Supported by:
- The Australian Lawyers for Human Rights
- The Australian Council for Human Rights Education
Co-presented by:
Speaker biographies in detail
Ethan Gutmann (featured in the film)
Ethan Gutmann, an award-winning China analyst and human-rights investigator, is the author of the award winning book Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal. He has written widely on China issues for publications such as the Wall Street Journal Asia, Investor’s Business Daily, Weekly Standard, National Review, and World Affairs Journal, and he has provided testimony and briefings to the United States Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency, the European Parliament, the International Society for Human Rights in Geneva, the United Nations, and the parliaments of Ottawa, Canberra, Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. A former foreign-policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, Gutmann has appeared on PBS, CNN, BBC, and CNBC. His most recent book is The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution To It’s Dissident Problem.
Ethan is one of three researchers who just released a ground breaking report An Update to Research On Organ Harvesting in China. Ethan will give personal insights regarding this new report, which meticulously examines the transplant programs of hundreds of hospitals in China, drawing on media reports, official propaganda, medical journals, hospital websites and a vast amount of deleted websites found in archives, ethan-gutmann.com.
Prof Jacob Lavee (featured in the film - via video call - 3rd Aug only)
Prof. Jacob (Jay) Lavee is the Director of the Heart Transplantation Unit and Deputy Director of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at the Leviev Heart Center of the Sheba Medical Center and Professor of Surgery at the Tel Aviv University Sackler Faculty of Medicine in Israel. He received his M.D. cum laude degree from the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine and was subsequently trained in cardiothoracic surgery at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel, and in heart and lung transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in the USA. In 1991 he founded the Heart Transplantation Unit at the Sheba Medical Center which since has since become the largest of its kind in Israel, with over 250 heart transplantations performed to date. Since 1997 he has also developed an active ventricular assist device program and in 2001 implanted the first-in-man HeartMate II Left ventricular assist device.
He is the current President of the Israel Transplantation Society and past Chairman of the Israel Society of Cardiothoracic Surgery. He currently also serves as Chairman of the Heart and Lung Transplantation committee of Israel’s National Transplant Center, as member of the Israeli National Council of Heart and Vascular Diseases, as member of the Board of Councilors of the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group, as member of the Ethics Committee of The Transplantation Society and as a member of the international advisory board of the Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) NGO.
Prof. Lavee spearheaded the preparations of the new Israeli Organ Transplant Law and has published numerous research articles in the medical literature and co-authored an extensive textbook on the management of bleeding problems in patients undergoing open-heart operations.
Prof Maria Fiatarone Singh
Professor Fiatarone Singh is a geriatrician whose research, clinical, and teaching career has focused on the integration of medicine, exercise physiology, and nutrition as a means to improve health status and quality of life across the lifespan. She has held the inaugural John Sutton Chair of Exercise and Sport Science in the Faculty of Health Sciences, and Professorship, Sydney Medical School, at the University of Sydney since 1999, and has been awarded many grants from the government and other funding bodies to conduct research into exercise and aging. She is the founding director of the Fit for Your Life Foundation, an international non-profit organization, and co-founded the STRONG Clinic at Balmain Hospital. She has published extensively in the area of health implications of exercise and nutrition and is actively involved as a Medical Advisory Board member of the international group DAFOH (Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting).
Prof Wendy Rogers
Wendy Rogers is a Professor of Clinical Ethics and Deputy Director, Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics. She has a long-standing interest in the ethics of organ donation and transplantation. While a member of the Australian Health Ethics Committee (2003-2006), she served as deputy chair of the working party responsible for developing the National Ethical Guidelines on Organ and Tissue Donation. She also served on working parties developing national guidance on donation after circulatory death. Her current research interests include organ donation, research ethics, ethics of surgical practice, and over diagnosis. Wendy's work is widely published in international journals and she is the co-editor of a recent collection on Vulnerability (published by Oxford University Press).
For more information about the Australian Premiere, please visitEventbrite.
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