Many countries in the world, both developed and developing countries, must address the issue of responsible conduct of research. This issue focuses both on the integrity of investigators and on the protection of human subjects participating in clinical trials in biomedical and behavioral research. These issues are particularly important in China for at least the following reasons: 1) China has the largest population in the world who are lack of the awareness of bioethics concerns. 2) The international research community and many pharmaceutical companies regard China as a fertile testing ground for international clinical and epidemiological trials and concerns have already been raised about the quality of informed consent, the use of placebo-control trials, and human subjects protection in such projects. And 3) the Chinese research community have felt the urgent need for guidance in how to conduct clinical trials, including international trials, in an ethical, legal and socially acceptable way that protects the rights of human subjects. China has an urgent need to develop a cohort of bioethicists who can serve as trainers of trainers to promote ethical conducts both in research and in clinical work. We therefore propose this International Bioethics Education and Career Development program with a capacity of training 8 postdoctoral bioethics researchers and 12 Master of Science students majoring in International Bioethics. The program, which offers most educational course work at Peking University Health Science Center and field study experience at 4 US universities, will also provide a mechanism for intensive training of 160 bioethics leaders to develop their leadership roles and knowledge. All the graduates from this program are guaranteed a teaching or research position at their home institutions. Their experience in the United States will help Chinese medical community to 1) keep up with the world state-of-the-art knowledge and development of bioethics, 2) develop research collaborations with their US counterparts, 3) observe international guidelines in research performance.
