Ethical tour

26 March 2009

Wellcome Trust staff have recently completed a tour of the Asia-Pacific region to raise awareness of our support for biomedical ethics research in developing countries.

Jacob Leveridge and Liz Shaw began in Auckland at the Ninth Global Forum on Bioethics in Research. Supported by the Trust, the Forum focused on the ethics of research involving indigenous peoples and vulnerable populations. A highlight was a presentation from Melanie Cheung, who spoke on the ethical dilemmas she faced as a Maori researcher using post-mortem human brain tissue to study Huntington’s disease.

From New Zealand, Jacob went on to the University of the Philippines, Manila, then the newly established Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, and finally Vietnam, where he spoke at the Institute of Biotechnology and Vietnam National University in Hanoi, and visited the Trust’s Major Overseas Programme and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Ho Chi Minh City.