“We wanted to produce something more than vague principles; people need concrete advice on real and immediate issues they confront in the lab, on institutional review boards, in patient organizations, and so on,” said conference co-organizer Hank Greely, the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law at Stanford and a leading expert in bioethics who directs Stanford’s Center for Law and the Biosciences. “This report points the way to the systems we need to provide that clarity going forward.”

People need concrete advice on real and immediate issues they confront in the lab, on institutional review boards, in patient organizations.
Hank Greely
The Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law

“Technology, in biology and elsewhere, is advancing at amazing speed – but the world needs more robust and flexible systems to track its progress, to understand it, and to use it to decrease human suffering while avoiding abuses,” said Greely. “We hope that our efforts in this field may be a useful model for other areas where more engagement between technologists and society is sorely needed.”