Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Britain will soon have its first national bioethics committee. The Nuffield
Foundation plans to launch a Council on Bioethics in May, to run initially
for three years, with funds of about pounds sterling 150 000 a year. The
council will be purely advisory. Its task will be to identify and define
ethical questions raised by research, and to set up specialist working parties
to tackle particular topics.

The council will deal with the whole field of bioethics. This marks
a radical change from the traditional British approach of ad hoc committees
on particular topics, such as embryo research or gene therapy. The new council
will focus on all ‘ethical issues arising from biological and medical research
and its initial applications’, says David Shapiro of the Nuffield Foundation,
who is in charge of the bioethics initiative. Ethical dilemmas relating
to ‘practice and established techniques’ will be left to the British Medical
Association and the General Medical Council.

One of the prime motives for the new British venture is concern about
the public’s reaction to biomedical research. The council, says Shapiro,
would try ‘to respond to, and to anticipate, public concern’ and ‘to promote
public understanding and discussion’. The national body will also enable
Britain to play a greater part in European bioethics discussions.

The foundation spent almost two years consulting scientists, lawyers,
theologians and philosophers. ‘There was a widespread feeling that Britain
needs some sort of committee comparable to the French, and the government
doesn’t seem keen to take it on,’ says Shapiro.

The size and composition of the committee are still undecided, but the
Nuffield Foundation proposes to appoint a dozen or so people ‘chosen for
their individual expertise, experience and public standing’. A majority
should be ‘lay’ in the sense of being neither scientists nor clinicians.
An eminent lawyer is favoured for the chair. ‘Our proposals are now in Whitehall,
awaiting comments from government departments,’ says Shapiro.

Nuffield acknowledges that there are ‘reservations in some quarters’
and stresses that the new national body must have enough authority to influence
the government and Parliament. But support for the project seems widespread
among biomedical researchers in Britain, beleaguered as they are by antivivisectionists,
environmental activists and ‘right-to-lifers’ who oppose embryo research.

At a recent meeting at the Royal Society, Walter Bodmer of the Imperial
Cancer Research Fund argued for ‘some sort of national forum to stimulate
public discussion and promote the public understanding of science’.

David Weatherall, a leading clinical geneticist at the University of
Oxford, also welcomed the initiative. ‘We need to think a little harder
about how to deal with the genetic information we may get from new research,
and its commercial exploitation,’ he said.

But another speaker, Sydney Brenner of the MRC Molecular Genetics Unit
in Cambridge and a promoter of the human genome project, was more sceptical.
‘Our increasing knowledge of human genetics does not raise any new ethical
questions,’ Brenner said. ‘There is no essential difference in reading genes
directly, and doing so from the diagnosis of symptoms and family history,
as in current medical practice,’ he said.