Ethics, Values, Professional Responsibilities

The centerpiece of this Center for Biomedical Ethics project is a meeting to be held in Minneapolis on April 19-20, 1991. The topic of the meeting is 'Genetics Counseling: Ethics, Values, and Professional Responsibilities'. The meeting will be an invitation only 'working conference' involving 12 experts from outside Minnesota and 5 Minnesotans who will meet, present papers and engage in discussions with an interdisciplinary and interprofessional group of approximately 210 scholars and professionals, the majority of whom are affiliated with the University of Minnesota. The objectives of the meeting are: to identify and critically assess current normative stances in genetic counseling; to examine the nature and adequacy of the norms of 'value neutrality' and 'non-directiveness' for genetic counseling practice; to help identify those issues in genetics counseling most likely to be affected by the human genome project; to present the best thinking about the ethical issues current in the field of genetics counseling to a 'core' group of individuals at the University of Minnesota so that they will be in a better position to undertake a more systematic inquiry into these issues under the aegis of a long-term systematic study of the area; and to produce a book of scholarly papers based on the conference which will help advance academic and public understanding of the ethical and value issues facing providers and patients in the area of genetic counseling. Conference date: April 19-20, 1991, Minneapolis, Minnesota