Social, Ethical and Public Policy Implications of Advances in the Biomedical Sciences

The Wellcome Trust's initiative on pharmacogenetics

In June 1997, the Governors of the Wellcome Trust decided to fund a programme of research into the social, ethical and public policy implications of advances in biomedicine, under the title of the Biomedical Ethics Programme. This is a new area for the Trust, and is its response to the growing recognition over recent years that advances in biomedical science raise questions of ethics and of social impact that require careful examination and in some cases suitable regulatory supervision.

This paper describes the Biomedical Ethics Programme, and reports on the results of the pharmacogenetics workshop that took place on 29 October 1999 in London.

Download the report of the workshop [PDF 40KB].