Subtitle: What do published studies reveal about potential directions for empirical ethics research? From the abstract: Critical illness trials involving genetic data collection are increasingly commonplace and pose challenges not encountered in less acute settings, related in part to the precipitous, severe and incapacitating nature of the diseases involved. We performed a systematic literature review to understand the nature of such studies conducted to date, and to consider, from an ethical perspective, potential barriers to future investigations. The Pharmacogenomics Journal (1:9 2009)