Bioethics

Find information about bioethics and related subjects.

Special Topics


 

 


ELSIhub was created "to provide you with scholarship, educational content, webinars, community news, and resources focused on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genetics and genomics. We conduct ongoing assessments and respond to the needs of members of the ELSI community and beyond.

  • Very helpful 6-minute tour of the site (scroll down) -- you should definitely listen to it before hunting around the site.
     
  • In the video, you will hear the word "CERA," which stands for Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis. This group is managed by "a team of staff in the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University and the Division of Ethics in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University."
     
  • The video explains what each of the headings (shown above) contains. Most of the site's content is under Resources, and includes ELSI hub Collections, which are "essential reading lists on fundamental or emerging topics in ELSI, curated and explained by expert Collection Editors, often paired with ELSI trainees. This series assembles materials from cross-disciplinary literatures to enable quick access to key information." The collections include:
    -- How Do We Diversity Human Genomics Research?
    -- Human Gene Editing and the Ethics of Enhancement
    -- Genetics Toolkit: Preventing Misuse of Genetic Science
    -- Addressing Algorithmic Unfairness in Healthcare

 

The Meaning of Eugenics: Historical and Present-Day Discussions of Eugenics and Scientific Racism

National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Symposium, December 2021

Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement
  • Contains more than 2200 photographs, documents, and other images showing this era in America's past. The archive is one of the collections maintained by Cold Spring Harbor, which was the site of the Eugenics Records Office from 1910 to 1940.
Sterilization and Social Justice Lab (U. Michigan)
  • "Studying the history of sterilization in the U.S. Team includes historians, epidemiologists, and digital humanists. We explore patterns and experiences of eugenics and sterilization... We connect this history to reproductive, disability, and racial justice, as we reflect on the relevance of the past to social justice today." 

Human Genome Project (HGP)

When the U.S. Government began the HGP, the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted 3-5% of their annual HGP budgets to study the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) about genetic information.

In alphabetical order.

More information under Oaths and Codes on this guide.
 

(Thank you to Pace Law Library Guide)

 

Office of Technology Assessment Reports
  • Between 1972 and 1995, the Office of Technology Assessment "provided Congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analysis of the complex scientific and technical issues of the late 20th century."
     
  • You can search these reports by title, year, or topic

 

The Bioethics Research Library at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics is "home to the world’s largest and most diverse collection of materials on the ethics of health, the environment, and emerging technologies."
 
The library maintains archives of the national committees to advise the U.S. government about bioethical issues which existed intermittently from 1974 through 2017.
  • Here is the list of those groups, with links to their archival sites

  • The last of these was the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which "advises the President on bioethical issues that may emerge from advances in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology."
  • "As of January 15th, 2017,  this website will no longer be updated but continues to be available as an archive of the work of the 2009-2017 Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues."
The library also maintains archives of other groups, including the National Heart Transplantation Study (1981-1984), Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel (1988), and Human Embryo Research Panel (1994). The complete list is here.