Seminar on Ethical and Policy Issues Arising From the Project to Map and Sequence the Human Genome

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Professors Daniel Kevles and Leroy Hood of the California Institute of Technology have organized a seminar for the 1989/1990 academic year to address issues of ethics and policy related to the human genome project. The seminar will bring together faculty, research staff, and students associated with the new Science and Technology Center (STC) for Biotechnology with members and affiliates of the Caltech Program on Science, Ethics, and Public Policy, which is situated in the Humanities Division. Specialists and humanists working on the genome project or concerned with the ethical issues surrounding it in the Los Angeles area will also participate. With support from this grant, Professors Kevles and Hood will bring to Caltech outside speakers for eight sessions of this seminar. The issues to be examined at these seminars center on the ethical and policy issues concerned with accomplishing the mapping and sequencing of the genome and with the information that the genome project will produce. With respect to the issues surrounding the mapping and sequencing of the genome, speakers will examine the implications of the genome project for biology in general, including questions of the pace and strategy of the project, its implications for the allocation of R&D resources, prospects for international cooperation, and likely impact upon the conduct of biology. With respect to issues centering on the information produced by the project, speakers will address such concerns as "ownership" of the information and how the information is to be used. It is vitally important that these kinds of issues be addressed by scientists and humanists who will play central roles in the development of the human genome project. Working together to avoid the ethical quagmires which could beset this project, they may increase public confidence in and support of the project. As the site of the STC for biotechnology, there is hardly a better place for such discussions to take place.