The Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, has published today her latest Annual Report, Generation Genome. It brings together independently authored chapters with an overview from the CMO reflecting on them and making recommendations for future policy. She sees the 100,000 Genome Project as an important showcase for what can be achieved through standardisation and coordination to provide the infrastructure that enables genomic medicine to move from a fragmented set of loosely connected ‘cottage industries’ into a comprehensive service that can make ‘precision medicine’ available to all those who can benefit from it. (more…)

Cosmetic procedures are big business.

Or at least, we think they are.

As with other research questions for the Council’s current project on cosmetic procedures, we’ve come up against a roadblock in trying to find out the financial value of the cosmetic procedures industry: a lack of data. (more…)

Given the international reach of our 2015 report Children and clinical research: ethical issues, it’s surprising to recall that at the start of the project, we had a serious discussion as to whether we could justify extending the scope of the project beyond the borders of the UK. (more…)

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ report on non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) was published last week, with a launch event in the House of Commons. The event itself was full of emotion, reflecting the real and important impact that NIPT and prenatal testing can have on people’s lives. The report has also elicited a number of other reactions. (more…)

A fortnight ago the US National Academies of Sciences and of Medicine published their long anticipated report Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance. Last week we had a meeting of our own Nuffield Council Working Party on human genome editing, which has given me both the excuse and the exigency to read the report in full. (more…)

This post was written by Dr Agomoni Ganguli Mitra, Research Associate (Liminal Spaces Project) and Teaching Fellow, Mason Institute, School of Law, University of Edinburgh and Dr Nayha Sethi, Research Fellow (Liminal Spaces Project) and Deputy Director, Mason Institute, School of Law, University of Edinburgh. It first appeared on The Motley Coat – a blog of the Mason Institute

In 2016, in the wake of the Ebola and the Zika outbreaks, the international community’s response to global health emergencies and their associated moral, regulatory and political implications once again came under intense scrutiny. (more…)

In September 2016 I arrived at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) to begin a three-month Fellowship funded by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The aim of the Fellowship is to produce a four-page briefing document for parliamentarians (known as a ‘POSTnote’) on an area of science and technology that raises bioethical issues. The topic that the POST Board had chosen was ‘integrity in research’, a subject which built on previous work conducted by the Nuffield Council into the culture of research in the UK. (more…)

By Tara Clancy, Council Member

Patients, families and advocacy groups are amongst those who have an interest in the ethical questions that non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) raises. So, what have we done to ensure their views and experiences are included and to enable them to contribute to the Council’s current project on NIPT? (more…)