Dr. Sanjay A. Pai

Sanjay Pai is a surgical pathologist in Bengaluru whose second career, in medical ethics and the history of medicine, has been as substantial as the first. He took his MBBS at Grant Medical College in Mumbai and his MD in pathology at Tata Memorial Hospital, then added a postgraduate diploma in medical law and ethics from the National Law School of India University.

He has been on the editorial board of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics since 1996 and served as a working editor, including a spell as acting editor in 2005. He has sat on the working committee of the National Medical Journal of India since 2000, and served on the institutional review boards of Manipal Hospitals from 2004 to 2008 and of Columbia Asia Referral Hospital from 2010 to 2016.

Institutional review boards are where medical ethics stops being a subject and becomes a decision about a particular study and a particular patient. That he has spent more than a decade on them, rather than only writing about them, is the distinguishing feature of the record.

His stated interests are surgical pathology, medical ethics, and the history of medicine and of science — an unusually wide brief for a working diagnostician, and one that has made him a recognisable voice in Indian medical writing beyond the laboratory.