This study employs a critical content analytic approach to ascertain the degree of perfectionist, essentialist and discriminatory social norms associated with the rise in public discourse about genetic medicine. It employs a coding protocol with demonstrated intercoder reliability. Using this protocol, coders will be able to produce a quantitative survey of a structured random sample of congressional discourse, newspapers, popular magazines, and television coverage from 1950 to 1995.

The goal of this project is to identify and analyze the challenges that genetic enhancements pose for American health policy and social policy. It will place genetics into the context of other medical technologies of enhancement, and, thereby, clarify the dynamics promoting their use and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of regulatory practices. Although genetic enhancement is still in a fledgling state, technologies under development are soon likely to create new and powerful interventions. Accordingly, the project will conduct intensive analysis of three critical areas:

During each of the summers of 2000, 2001 and 2002, Dartmouth's Ethics Institute proposes to offer a Faculty Institute to a group of 20 college and university teachers in order to prepare them to teach undergraduate courses on the ethical, legal and social implications of the Human Genome Project. This effort will be a continuation of the very successful model undergraduate course and Faculty Institute we offered during the summers of 1997 and 1998. This modified Institute program will distill the experience from our previous efforts and focus exclusively on teacher preparation.

In response to the extraordinary interest in and demand for substantial training in undergraduate ELSI education, Dartmouth College's Ethics Institute proposes to expand the number of annual offerings of its Summer Faculty Institute and to support the development of an additional center for ELSI education at Howard University. These initiatives would increase the number of undergraduate educators equipped to teach ELSI issues from 20 to 60 each year, and would stimulate new interest in ELSI education.

This project will develop a new multidisciplinary undergraduate course in the ethical, legal, and social implications of the Human Genome Project. The course will offer a case-study oriented approach, focusing on representative genetic diseases, genetic programs, or episodes in the history of genetics, which will allow students to learn to identify and assess emerging issues and apply and test the analytical skills they develop as the course precedes. The course will serve as a model which can be exported to other colleges or universities.

This project will delineate the major ethical, legal and social issues accompanying the use of genomic information to enhance normal traits in individuals and families, and to identify the precedents that best illuminate those issues for policy-making purposes. The study will use a traditional policy analysis approach to generate specific positions on five issues of genetic enhancement policy issues: 1) Do the human subjects of clinical research on genetic enhancement interventions require special protections? 2) How should the professionally acceptable limits of genomic services be drawn?

In their previous project, these investigators examined the ethical and legal issues raised by the prospect of using the products of human genome research for enhancement purposes. This work identified three critical challenges to the development of social poicy in this area. First, most interventions that can be used for enhancement are likely to be initially developed and approved for therapeutic use.

The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law will analyze the appropriate role for state government in issues of genetics policy, identify specific issues involving genetic testing and screening most suited to legislation or regulation at the state level, and devise concrete recommendations for legislation and/or regulation to serve as a model for adoption by states nationwide.

The project focuses on the applied development of an effective informed consent form and process for donation of blood to a DNA Bank solely for research purposes. This form will be used for securing consent from patients in the General Clinical Research Center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, from whom a blood sample will be solicited. A short series of vignettes will also be developed to prompt cognitive processing of the information in the consent form.

This conference will provide practicing physicians with the information they need to integrate the latest developments in genetic medicine into direct patient care. The program planning committee is comprised of the major primary care provider professional associations AAFP, AAP, ACOG, ASIM, as well as the AMA's Ethics Institute, the College of American Pathologists, the American College of Genetics, the American Society of Human Genetics, the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute.