 McGee was raised by adoptive parents on the faculty of Baylor University in Waco, Texas.He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Human Genome Project.From 1995 to 2005, McGee was an assistant professor and associate director for education at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, where he held joint appointments in philosophy, history and sociology of science, cellular and molecular engineering, and was a Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.