This 3-Year Project (Amended Application) seeks support for an innovative inter-regional public education model, in New York and Arizona, aimed at developing and using public libraries as centers for information, education and discussion of genomics and the Human Genome Project, with outreach emphasis on communities of color, Native Americans, and residents of isolated or low-income communities, to include ethical, legal and social issues and gene environment interactions.

Psychiatric genetic research (PGR) holds great promise for preventing, understanding, and treating neuropsychiatric disorders - a source of immense societal burden and personal suffering. Such research poses many ethical challenges, and failure to perform systematic study of the ethical issues surrounding PGR may threaten societal acceptance of this important scientific work. To date, NIH has not funded any work on PGR that focuses on collecting empirical data about ethical issues.

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) proposes to study the views of policymakers on the role of government in the prevention and treatment of birth defects and developmental disabilities through three annual conferences.

The Advancing Research Ethics training in Southern Africa (ARESA) program will promote responsible research in southern Africa by offering a postgraduate Diploma/Masters level educational program to health care and other professionals in research ethics and by developing a national network for Research Ethics Committee (REC) members.

Genomic information offers the opportunity for "personalized prevention" in both clinical practice and public health settings. To date, such efforts have focused primarily on chronic diseases and their behavioral risk factors. We propose an exploratory CEER to study the ethical, legal, social and policy (ELSP) issues arising in the novel and timely context of infectious disease.

While the value of identifying individuals in the population who carry `actionable' variants and screening their relatives (i.e. cascade screening) is widely acknowledged, there are numerous barriers in implementing this process and studying the optimal approaches for doing this. First, the feasibility of returning genetic results is complex as it depends on many issues, including the community expectations, consent form language, local IRB considerations, and logistical, feasibility, and cost issues, among others.