Newcastle University

PEALS hosted a two day workshop in November with colleagues from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University, Sweden.

CRB, led by Professor Mats Hansson,  is a leading bioethics centre, with which PEALS has been developing increasingly close and formal links over the last ten years, culminating in the completion of a Memorandum of Understanding to develop collaborations in January 2010.

At the workshop all Staff and PhD students from both Centres explored their shared interests in and different approaches to examining a range of topics in the life sciences, such as

• the donation of human tissue to medical research;
• end of life decisions;
• responding to an ageing society;
• the function and scope of regulation of the medical sciences;
• the influence of genetics on understandings of individual, familial and community identity;
• the interrelationship between brain development and environment.

Through our exploration of these topics we interrogated key sociological and bioethical normative concepts such as the good life, moral response and action, citizenship, and obligation and reciprocity.

The workshop concluded with an agreed set of activities to take forward our shared interests, in particular regular e-seminars, PhD student exchanges, specialised networks of discussion, and the development of overlapping research projects.

The meeting was made possible by support from Newcastle University’s Research and Innovation Strategic Funding and we are very grateful for the support.