The applicant proposes to hold a conference on the implications for our understanding of health and moral responsibility of the Human Genome Initiative. The purpose of the conference will be to better anticipate the cultural impact that knowledge generated by the Human Genome Initiative will have on society. If the basic knowledge and clinical applications it generates are as powerful as expected, they will change not simply some aspects of the practice of medicine but no less change our conceptions of health and illness, the relationship of concepts of the self to illness, and moral responsibility for the individual use of genetic knowledge. The conference will be held on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in March or April of 1991. It will draw together speakers from the fields of medicine and genetics, philosophy, history, and the social sciences. The four major themes of the conference will encompass: cultural understandings of diseases and illness, moral responsibility, the political implications of genetic classifications, and the moral imperative to seek a cure for disease in general and genetic disease in particular. The program will be open to the public but will particularly be aimed at the researchers and others involved in the Human Genome Initiative in Northern California and the Bay Area. A conference report designed for wide circulation will help to assure wide distribution of the conference results.
