Geneva Statement on Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Need for Course Correction.

As public interest advocates, policy experts, bioethicists, and scientists, we call for a course correction in public discussions about heritable human genome editing. Clarifying misrepresentations, centering societal consequences and concerns, and fostering public empowerment will support robust, global public engagement and meaningful deliberation about altering the genes of future generations.

Overvaluing individual consent ignores risks to tribal participants.

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.

Introduction to the article collection 'Translation in healthcare: ethical, legal, and social implications'.

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.

The commercialization of human eggs in mitochondrial replacement research.

After the development of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) in 2007, the pressure to commercialize women's eggs for stem cell research could have been expected to lessen. However, the pressure to harvest human eggs in large quantities for research has not diminished; rather, it has taken different directions, for example in germline mitochondrial research. Yet there has been little acknowledgement of these technologies' need for human eggs, the possible risks to women and the ethical issues concerning potential exploitation.

Regulating (or not) reproductive medicine: an alternative to letting the market decide.

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.

Gender and ethics committees: where's the 'different voice'?

Prominent international and national ethics commissions such as the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee rarely achieve anything remotely resembling gender equality, although local research and ethics committees are somewhat more egalitarian. Under-representation of women is particularly troubling when the subject matter of modern bioethics so disproportionately concerns women's bodies, and when such committees claim to derive 'universal' standards. Are women missing from many ethics committees because of relatively straightforward, if discriminatory, demographic factors? Or are the methods of analysis and styles of ethics to which these bodies are committed somehow 'anti-female'? It has been argued, for example, that there is a 'different voice' in ethical reasoning, not confined to women but more representative of female experience.

Consent, commodification and benefit-sharing in genetic research.

The global value of the biotechnology industry is now estimated at 17 billion dollars, with over 1300 firms involved as of the year 2000.(2) It has been said that 'What we are witnessing is nothing less than a new kind of gold rush, and the territory is the body.' As in previous gold rushes, prospectors are flooding into unexplored and 'wide open' territories from all over the world, with possible ramifications for exploitation of Third World populations.

Commodification of human tissue: implications for feminist and development ethics.

One effect of late capitalism--the commodification of practically everything--is to knock down the Chinese walls between the natural and productive realms, to use a Marxist framework. Women's labour in egg extraction and 'surrogate' motherhood might then be seen as what it is, labour which produces something of value. But this does not necessarily mean that women will benefit from the commodification of practically everything, in either North or South.

Evidence-based medicine and quality of care.

In this paper we set out to examine the arguments for and against the claim that Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) will improve the quality of care. In particular, we examine the following issues: 1. Are there hidden ethical assumptions in the methodology of EBM? 2.

Cross-cultural issues in European bioethics.

European biomedical ethics is often contrasted to American autonomy-based approaches, and both are usually distinguished as 'Western'. But at least three 'different voices' within European bioethics can be identified: the deontological codes of southern Europe (and Ireland), in which the patient has a positive duty to maximise his or her own health and to follow the doctor's instructions, whilst the physician is constrained more by professional norms than by patient rights; the liberal, rights-based models of Western Europe, in which the patient retains the negative right to override medical opinion, even if his or her mental capacity is in doubt; the social welfarist models of the Nordic countries, which concentrate on positive rights and entitlements to universal healthcare provision and entrust dispute resolution to non-elected administrative officials.