The Bilateral Approach

My presentation was a reflection on (1) my experiences in doing bioethics transnationally and (2) the advantages and disadvantages of taking a bilateral approach to bioethical oversight. I helped develop ethical recommendations as a part of BIONET, a EU-China collaborative project on ethical governance of biomedical research, which has been funded by the European Commission and the UK Medical Research Council as well as supported by Chinese Ministries, universities, and scholars. The project had a large descriptive and analytical part to it, which included mapping biomedical research in European-Chinese collaborations. In a series of one-week workshops in China and the UK, 30 detailed best practice recommendations were developed and published in 2010. They give key guidance regarding how to improve governance of both publicly and privately funded collaborative transnational research practices in the biomedical field. For more on the topic please also see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23623168 .

Christoph Rehmann-Sutter (Ex-Co-Chairman BIONET Expert Group)