Dr. Allan Ropper is executive vice chair of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. He wrote an editorial accompanying the article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Richard Payne is a professor of medicine and divinity at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He is an expert on end-of-life issues and Christianity.

Marie T. Hilliard is a senior fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, where she also serves as director of bioethics and public policy. The center offers a resource guide on Catholicism and the use of vaccines.

Dr. Joseph J. Fins is chief of the division of medical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College in Ithaca, N.Y., and professor of medicine, public health and medicine in psychiatry. He is also an associate at the Hastings Center. He wrote A Palliative Ethic of Care: Clinical Wisdom at Life’s End.

Dr. James L. Bernat is professor of neurology and medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and heads the Bioethics Committee at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. He is the author of Ethical Issues in Neurology, 3rd ed.

Nancy Berlinger is deputy director and research scholar at the Hastings Center in Garrison, N.Y., and director of its Guidelines on End of Life Care project. She is the author of After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics of Forgiveness.

Julie Nemecek, as the Rev. John Nemecek, was a Baptist minister and longtime professor at Spring Arbor University in Spring Arbor, Mich. The school fired her in December 2006 after she had come out as transgender. She filed a discrimination claim that was later settled, and is now founder and head of a consulting company […]

The Rev. Drew Phoenix, who underwent sex-change surgery and changed his name from Anne Gordon, is executive director of Identity Inc., an LGBT advocacy group in Anchorage, Alaska.

Erin Swenson, a who lives in the Atlanta area and was ordained in 1973 as Eric Karl Swenson by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in 1996 openly changed gender while working as a pastor. She is a licensed marriage therapist in Atlanta, Ga., where she works with individuals and families on gender identity issues.