Publications

The Program and the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of human genome research is a branch of the National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NCHGR is responsible, in conjunction with the Office of Health and Environment at the Department of...

The emergence of implantable drug delivery systems will allow us to produce the effects of psychosurgery and surgical sterilization without their irreversible invasions of bodily integrity. However, this clinical advantage does not resolve the most important ethical problems these surgeries face, and may even obscure them when they arise in...

Although the ability to perform gene therapy in human germ-line cells is still hypothetical, the rate of progress in molecular and cell biology suggests that it will only be a matter of time before reliable clinical techniques will be within reach. Three sets of arguments are commonly advanced against developing...

In this essay, I examine the sources and reach of the NIH “Points to Consider.” These guidelines are based on normative considerations inherited from two sets of science policy deliberations that took place in the United States during the 1970s: the discussion of research with human subjects and the recombinant...

The ethical and clinical dimensions of strabismus surgery in a case of an infant with mucolipidosis type II are discussed. Three sets of considerations are relevant to the decision of performing such surgery: professional obligations to protect patients from futile or contraindicated treatment; parental authority to assess the risks and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The fifteen-year “human genome project” at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy officially began on October 1, 1990. With it began a new dimension in federally supported scientific research: concurrent funding for work...

Almost every form of cancer in humans has been reported to aggregate in families. These familial clusters can be due to inheritance of a mutated cancer-susceptibility gene, though other explanations include chance association and shared exposures to environmental carcinogens. In recent years, the chromosomal locations of some cancer-predisposing genes have...

The articles in this issue illuminate psychosocial issues raised by the development and delivery of new medical technologies. Five kinds of questions surface repeatedly: questions about a technology’s purpose(s), the value judgments it presumes, the locus of its control, the external forces that drive it, and its long-term social risks....