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Dr Catherine Rhodes is a research fellow at the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation specialising in the international regulations relevant to control of biotechnology. Professor John Harris is director of the Institute and has particular interest in biomedical ethics and medical jurisprudence. Sarah Chan is deputy director of the Institute. Professor Sir John Sulston was the founding director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre in Cambridge from 1992 to 2000, where so much of the sequencing of the human genome was completed in a furious race to publish before American commercial interests patented. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Harris has previously proposed that there is a moral duty to participate in scientific research. This concept has recently been challenged by Iain Brassington, who asserts that the principles cited by Harris in support of the duty to research fail to establish its existence. In this paper we address these criticisms and provide new arguments for the existence of a moral obligation to research participation. This obligation, we argue, arises from two separate but related principles. The principle of fairness obliges us to support the social institutions which sustain us, of which research is one; while the principle of beneficence, or the duty of rescue, imposes upon us a duty to prevent harm to others, including by supporting potentially beneficial, even life-saving research. We argue that both these lines of argument support the duty to research, and explore further aspects of this duty, such as to whom it is owed and how it might be discharged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the reaction of Tom Baldwin, Deputy Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in Great Britain, on sex selection. Complaints of Baldwin against the comments of author John Harris on HFEA inquiry; Effects of sex selection on children; Reasons for using sex selection in the discussion of genetic determination.

Provides information on the changes in the "Journal of Medical Ethics" as of August 2004, including the appointment of Søren Holm and John Harris as editors-in-chief.