As the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work – and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. In this essay we focus on the Human Microbiome Project … Read more

Bioethics, the term now usually standing in for Biomedical Ethics, is a field of medical anthropological engagement. While many anthropologists and other social scientists work with bioethicists and physicians, this paper instead takes Bioethics as a topic of cultural research from the perspective of Cultural Bioethics and Interpretive Medical Anthropology. Application of useful findings of … Read more

Recently, a high number of companies have emerged that offer online direct-to-consumer DNA testing. We investigate these consumer genomics companies through the lens of identity. We find that many of them appeal to a kind of “genetic essentialism”. We suggest that this appeal is key to understanding why consumers are attracted to their services. There … Read more

Interest in whole-genome research has grown substantially over the past few months. This article explores the challenging ethics issues associated with this work.

Ambitions and efforts to control human aging are presently flourishing within biomedicine, but under the banners of two competing professional camps. On one side is an “anti-aging” movement of entrepreneurs and clinicians, offering dietary supplements, cosmetics, hormone injections, and other goods and services to combat aging and its effects. On the other side are biogerontologists—biologists … Read more

The claim that aging itself is treatable or even preventable has repeatedly been made over the centuries. Antiaging medicine is the current leader of approaches that even claim that geriatrics as a discipline will become increasingly unnecessary. The concept of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as a condition intermediate between normal cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease … Read more

The growth of public and professional interest in “anti-aging” interventions raises an ethical problem for the medical profession with important policy implications: is human aging an appropriate target for medical intervention? At present there is nothing that medicine can prescribe to combat aging that has any scientific validation (Olshansky, Hayflick, Carnes, 2002). But biogerontologists are … Read more

Family-based research is essential to understanding the genetic and environmental etiology of human disease. The success of family-based research often depends on investigators’ ability to identify, recruit, and achieve a high participation rate among eligible family members. However, recruitment of family members raises ethical concerns due to the tension between protecting participants’ privacy and promoting … Read more

Gene transfer often has multiple and unpredictable effects on cells. The high hope of genetic medicine for 30 years has been to develop a way of using recombinant DNA techniques to treat patients through the genes involved in their diseases. As Richard Roblin, scientific director of the Council on Bioethics of the President of the … Read more

Most contemporary “gene-hunting” begins as bench science in molecular genetics and often has relatively indirect connections with the kinds of clinical services that are relevant to the education and counseling of individuals regarding genetic information. Even when bench scientists are confident that the genetic information they uncover is reliable and medically relevant, they have been … Read more