Donna Dickenson

It is a truth universally acknowledged (apologies to Jane Austen) that complex and fast-moving new biotechnologies inevitably outstrip legal regulation and ethical scrutiny. Surrogacy, the subject ...

Sheela Saravanan begins her powerful book with this shocking statement: Having lived in India for 25 years of my life, inequalities were not a new phenomenon to me, but nothing had prepared me for ...

(2020). Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing. The New Bioethics. Ahead of Print.

Genomic studies often rely on individual-based consent approaches for tribal members residing outside of their communities. This consent model fails to acknowledge the risks to small groups such as tribes, which can implicate the community as a whole. Genomic studies often rely on individual-based consent approaches for tribal members residing outside of their communities. Tsosie et al. argue that this consent model fails to acknowledge the risks to small groups such as tribes, which can implicate the community as a whole.

Jenni Millbank's incisive article, ‘Reflecting the “human nature” of IVF embryos: disappearing women in ethics, law and fertility practice’,¹ takes issue with the prevailing concentration on ‘respect for the embryo’ in guidelines and statutes concerning embryo storage. She argues that there is insufficient regard for the specific significance of embryos to the women who underwent complex and difficult IVF procedures to create them. Such a fixation, she asserts, effectively makes these women ‘disappear’, failing to show respect for their effort, dignity, and agency. Here she cites the argument by Isabel Karpin that:

New technologies are transforming and reconfiguring the boundaries between patients, research participants and consumers, between research and clinical practice, and between public and private domains. From personalised medicine to big data and social media, these platforms facilitate new kinds of interactions, challenge longstanding understandings of privacy and consent, and raise fundamental questions about how the translational patient pathway should be organised. This editorial introduces the cross-journal article collection "Translation in healthcare: ethical, legal, and social implications", briefly outlining the genesis of the collection in the 2015 Translation in healthcare conference in Oxford, UK and providing an introduction to the contemporary ethical challenges of translational research in biology and medicine accompanied by a summary of the papers included in this collection.

Whilst India has been debating how to regulate 'surrogacy' the UK has undergone a major consultation on increasing the amount of 'expenses'paid to egg 'donors', while France has recently finished debating its entire package of bioethics regulation and the role of its Biomedicine Agency. Although it is often claimed that there is no alternative to the neo-liberal, market-based approach in regulating (or not) reproductive medicine--the ideology prevalent in both India and the UK--advocates of that position ignore the alternative model offered by France's tighter regulation, as well as its overarching concern with protecting the vulnerable and ensuring social justice. Whilst the concepts underpinning the French model of regulation also have their provenance in Western political philosophy and not in the developed world, they embody a very different attitude and suggest that there is indeed an alternative to letting the market decide. However, even in France that alternative is highly contested.