Paved with Good Intentions: Rethinking the Ethics of ELSI Research (Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Research) (Report‪)‬

Introduction Ethical, Legal and Social Implications ("ELSI") research has been a new constant in basic genomic projects for two decades. In the last 10 years, the inclusion of ELSI research as a required component in a wide range of sponsored basic and translational research projects--from medicine to chemistry--has reassured the public that scientists who receive public funding work closely with academic bioethicists, legal scholars and social theorists to carefully explore the implications of new science. These grants have also inspired a generation of bioethics research on genetics, genomics, stem cells, climate change, synthetic biology and nanotechnology. This article, while celebrating this attention to ethics, raises the issue of whether the structure of funding such work creates inadvertent conflicts of interest and commitment. This paper asks: if the Principal Investigator (PI) of the grant controls the funding of the ethics projects, can ethicists undertake serious, objective reflection and make normative suggestions independently and fearlessly, especially in an economic climate in which reductions in ethics and humanities funding jeopardize other employment?