Objective
Benefit sharing is an area of increasing international debate at the highest levels of policy making (WHO, WTO, WIPO). Despite the central significance of ethics in this context, ethical concerns have hardly been discussed nor researched in depth.
Benefit sharing occurs mainly in two areas:
- Human genetic banking for the purpose of pharmacogenomics or population genomics research (human genetic resources).
- Use of traditional knowledge from indigenous communities mainly by the pharmaceutical industry to develop new products (non-human genetic resources).
Researchers, specialists and stakeholders from the human and the non-human realm hardly ever have a chance to co-operate. This is particularly detrimental to those working in the human area, which lacks legally binding, international regulations already in existence for benefit sharing regarding plants, animals and micro-organisms (e.g. Convention on Biodiversity, 1992). It is therefore essential to create an international network of experts and stakeholders on benefit sharing from human and non-human areas to explore synergies and forward the benefit sharing debate for human genetic resources.
This project will establish an interdisciplinary team of ethicists, lawyers, economists, medical doctors, specialists in gender studies, representatives of indigenous communities and policy-advisors from five continents. The teams will study four paradigmatic international case studies (from South Africa, India, Iceland, and Kenya) to provide a profound state-of-the-art analysis for benefit sharing in the context of human and non-human resources.
Based on this comparative research, the main aim of this project is to promote policy developments by developing an "ethics health check" for benefit sharing agreements involving vulnerable groups and communities in the area of human genetics.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgenetics
- social sciencessociologygender studies
- social sciencessociologysocial issuessocial inequalities
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinemedical genetics
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Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2005-SCIENCE-AND-SOCIETY-14
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
PRESTON
United Kingdom