Guidance for considering ethical, legal, and social issues in health technology assessment: application to genetic screening.

Objectives And Methods: Many authors have argued that ethical, legal, and social issues ("ELSIs") should be explicitly integrated into health technology assessment (HTA), yet doing so poses challenges. This discussion may be particularly salient for technologies viewed as ethically complex, such as genetic screening. Here we provide a brief overview of contemporary discussions of the issues from the HTA literature.

Conflict of interest in clinical research: direct payment to the investigators for finding human subjects and health information.

The recent death of teenager Jesse Gelsinger in a drug therapy trial has drawn attention to how financial conflicts of interest may compromise patient protection. While research institutions throughout the world have instituted a variety of conflict of interest guidelines, the potential conflicts associated with investigators receiving direct payment from private companies for both the recruitment of patients and the running of clinical trials in pharmaceutical research remains a relatively unexplored area. Clinical researchers undoubtedly deserve to be reasonably compensated for their participation.

Do the print media "hype" genetic research? A comparison of newspaper stories and peer-reviewed research papers.

Background: The public gets most of its information about genetic research from the media. It has been suggested that media representations may involve exaggeration, called "genohype." To examine the accuracy and nature of media coverage of genetic research, we reviewed the reporting of single-gene discoveries and associated technologies in major daily newspapers in Canada, the United States, Great Britain and Australia.

From human genes to stem cells: new challenges for patent law?

The social controversies that have surrounded human cloning and the use of embryos for research purposes might create unique patent issues for stem cell researchers. Policy makers should learn from the legal and ethical concerns associated with human gene patents and develop coherent patent policies that recognize and clearly address emerging social controversies.

The moral tollbooth: a method that makes use of the patent system to address ethical concerns in biotechnology.

Patents granted for biotechnological innovations continue to cause social and ethical dilemmas. For example, much controversy surrounds the patenting of genes that predispose to breast-cancer, and in the USA the debate continues about whether or not stem-cell technology should be accessible to all. In this report, we argue that some of these concerns can be addressed within national patent systems.