Future work: have your say

Social care robots, artificial gametes, GM insects... What do you think are the biggest bioethical issues facing us over the next few years?

Every year, the Council draws up a list of possible future work topics to consider. We would like to hear your comments and views on the range of topics, and suggestions for any other topics you think the Council should be looking at. Topics identified by the Council include:

- Animal research ethics
- Artificial gametes
- Biotechnology and globalisation
- Dual-use technologies
- Food culture
- Gender selection
- Germline gene therapy
- Global health inequalities
- GM insects
- Health tourism in the UK
- Innovative therapies
- Longevity
- Non-invasive prenatal testing
- Participant-led research
- Social care robots
- Suppressing the extra chromosome in Down’s syndrome
- Targets for diagnosis
- Wearable health monitoring technologies

Summaries of each topic, and an outline of cross-cutting themes, are available to download here. The summaries aim to set out some of the key ethical considerations and provide a starting point for discussion, rather than a comprehensive analysis of the issues.

For a topic to be selected by the Council, it should fit with the following conditions:

- be novel: be linked to substantial new developments in medicine or biology
- raise ethical questions and concerns of some complexity
- be timely: the Council aims to be proactive in its selection of new topics
- lead to a report that would be likely to have an important impact on policy or practice
- be within the Council’s terms of reference