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There appears to be a conflict between global bioethical principles and the local understanding and application of these principles, but this conflict has misleadingly been characterized through the east-west dichotomy. This dichotomy portrays bioethical principles as western and as alien to non-western cultures. In this paper, I present reasons to reject the east-west dichotomy. Using the discussion around the principle of informed consent as an example, I propose that while bioethical values are common, bioethical governance must display a certain flexibility akin to Aristotle's metaphor about the Lesbian rule. Such flexibility combined with a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of bioethical subjects might lead to the purging of tensions between global and local, giving us Glocal Bioethics.© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In this chapter, we discuss the boundaries between explicit consent and other available legitimizing mechanisms in EU data protection law for health research, focusing on sensitive data. This begins with an overview of the normative values and limitations of consent, highlighting the partially overlapping but not entirely identical roles of consent in health research and data protection, and the possibility of relying on alternative safeguards when public interests are involved. Such normative debates, including the differences between research participant consent and data subject consent, are then put into a legal context, with an analysis of the interplay between explicit consent and other exemptions under Article 9(2) GDPR, such as the scientific research exemption. Grounded in this baseline framework, all 30 jurisdictions currently subject to the GDPR (as well as the UK) are compared in terms of how national laws have treated explicit consent and the scientific research exemption differently. Our analysis shows a divergent regulatory landscape when itcomes to the rules governing the use of sensitive data for health research.

There is a well-established common law doctrine for ascertaining information disclosure in informed consent claims within the treatment context that governs the doctor–patient relationship. But there is no such doctrine in clinical research governing the researcher–participant relationship in India. India, however, is not exceptional in this regard. Common law countries like the United States and Canada at most have sparse, non-systematised, criteria for such cases; arguably, a doctrine for research is at its nascent stage. But the adequacy of the existing criteria for settling informed consent claims in research has hardly ever been discussed. Furthermore, a specific discussion on the applicability of this ‘nascent doctrine’ to India is non-existent. This article discusses both. The article examines case law from India and other common law jurisdictions that hint at developments in this area. It suggests that Indian courts need to move abreast with other jurisdictions to better protect India’s patients and research participants.