What is 'legal' about bioethics? What are the ideas and artefacts that bioethics encompasses, and how are they related to law? What is the role of law in bioethics? In this work, Calvin Ho attempts to address these questions in the context of the governance of human pluripotent stem cell research. In essence, he argues that the hybridization of law, through processes, devices and techniques of juridification, has helped to constitute bioethics as a public sphere and an emergent civic epistemology.Drawing on his multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and on Actor-Network-Theory, Ho explains how the law has, through bioethics, contributed to the scientific and public understanding of human pluripotent stem cell research and its artefacts, particularly the embryo and human-animal combinations. Although the focus of his work is on bioethical developments in Singapore over a period of more than 15 years, parallel developments in key jurisdictions (especially the United States of America and the United Kingdom) and in international science policy are also evaluated. It is through appreciating how it has progressed that bioethics will be better able to engage with future challenges presented by advances in human embryo research and gene editing techniques, among others.

What is 'legal' about bioethics? What are the ideas and artefacts that bioethics encompasses, and how are they related to law? What is the role of law in bioethics? In this work, Calvin Ho attempts to address these questions in the context of the governance of human pluripotent stem cell research. In essence, he argues that the hybridization of law, through processes, devices and techniques of juridification, has helped to constitute bioethics as a public sphere and an emergent civic epistemology. Drawing on his multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and on Actor-Network-Theory, Ho explains how the law has, through bioethics, contributed to the scientific and public understanding of human pluripotent stem cell research and its artefacts, particularly the embryo and human-animal combinations. Although the focus of his work is on bioethical developments in Singapore over a period of more than 15 years, parallel developments in key jurisdictions (especially the United States of America and the United Kingdom) and in international science policy are also evaluated. It is through appreciating how it has progressed that bioethics will be better able to engage with future challenges presented by advances in human embryo research and gene editing techniques, among others.

A survey of the regulation of human germline genome modification in eighteen countries and the emerging international standards.

This timely Research Handbook offers significant insights into an understudied subject, bringing together a broad range of socio-legal studies of medicine to help answer complex and interdisciplinary questions about global health – a major challenge of our time.

Graeme Laurie stepped down from the Chair in Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. This edited collection pays tribute to his extraordinary contributions to the field. Graeme often spoke about the importance of 'legacy' in academic work and forged a remarkable intellectual legacy of his own, notably through his work on genetic privacy, human tissue and information governance, and the regulatory salience of the concept of liminality. The essays in this volume animate the concept of legacy to analyse the study and practice of medical jurisprudence. In this light, legacy reveals characteristics of both benefit and burden, as both an encumbrance to and facilitator of the development of law, policy and regulation. The contributions reconcile the ideas of legacy and responsiveness and show that both dimensions are critical to achieve and sustain the health of medical jurisprudence itself as a dynamic, interdisciplinary and policy-engaged field of thinking.

Human embryo research touches upon strongly felt moral convictions, and it raises such deep questions about the promise and perils of scientific progress that debate over its development has become a moral and political imperative. From in vitro fertilization to embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and gene editing, Americans have repeatedly struggled with how to define the moral status of the human embryo, whether to limit its experimental uses, and how to contend with sharply divided public moral perspectives on governing science. Experiments in Democracy presents a history of American debates over human embryo research from the late 1960s to the present, exploring their crucial role in shaping norms, practices, and institutions of deliberation governing the ethical challenges of modern bioscience. J. Benjamin Hurlbut details how scientists, bioethicists, policymakers, and other public figures have attempted to answer a question of great consequence: how should the public reason about aspects of science and technology that effect fundamental dimensions of human life? Through a study of one of the most significant science policy controversies in the history of the United States, Experiments in Democracy paints a portrait of the complex relationship between science and democracy, and of U.S. society's evolving approaches to evaluating and governing science's most challenging breakthroughs.

This book represents the coming together of a number of internationally renowned scholars from science, philosophy, law and social science. Each author presents a distinctive and critical account of the current ethical, social and jurisprudential issues concerning stem cell science: together covering both its research beginnings, and the future translation into the clinical setting. Original to this volume is an emphasis on the inter-state implications of developments in stem cell science from the perspective of a truly global collaboration of leading authors. Academics and policy-makers will find it an invaluable contribution to the socio-political and ethical discourse of stem cell science. Contributions from a team of leading academic experts Covers a wide array of disciplines: with original contributions focusing on the technological, legal, social and ethical aspects of stem cell science A unique collection of international perspectives on developments in stem cell science Book jacket.