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Asks whether personalised medicine is superior to 'one-size-fits-all' treatment. Does it elevate individual choice above the common good?
List of contents
1. Introduction to Personalised Medicine, Individual Choice and the Common Good Donna Dickenson, Britta van Beers and Sigrid Sterckx; 2. Personalised medicine and the politics of human nuclear genome transfer Françoise Baylis and Alana Cattapan; 3. Stem cell derived gametes and uterus transplants: hurray for the end of third party reproduction! Or not? Heidi Mertes; 4. Personalising future health risk through 'biological insurance': proliferation of private umbilical cord blood banking in India Jyotsna Gupta; 5. Combating the trade in organs: why we should preserve the communal nature of organ transplantation Kristof Van Assche; 6. When there is no cure: challenges for collective approaches to Alzheimer's disease Robin Pierce; 7. Lost and found: relocating the individual in the age of intensified data sourcing in European healthcare Klaus Hoeyer; 8. Presuming the promotion of the common good by large-scale health research: the cases of care.data 2.0 and the 100,000 Genomes Project in the UK Sigrid Sterckx, Sandi Dheensa and Julian Cockbain; 9. My genome, my right Stuart Hogarth, Julian Cockbain and Sigrid Sterckx; 10. 'The best me I can possibly be': legal subjectivity, self-authorship and wrongful life actions in an age of 'genomic torts' Britta van Beers; 11. I run, you run, we run: a philosophical approach to health and fitness apps Marli Huijer and Christian Detweiler; 12. The molecularised me: psychoanalysing personalised medicine and self-tracking Hub Zwart.
About the author
Britta van Beers is Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. As a legal philosopher she explores the notions of personhood and corporality within the regulation of biomedical technologies, such as assisted reproductive technologies, markets in human body materials and biomedical tourism. In 2011 she received the Praemium Erasmianum Research Prize for her Ph.D. dissertation on the legal relationship between persons and their bodies in the era of medical biotechnology (2009). Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Humanity in International Law and Biolaw (Cambridge, 2014) and Symbolic Legislation and Developments in Biolaw (2016).Sigrid Sterckx is a founding member of the Bioethics Institute, Ghent. Her current research projects focus on ethical and legal aspects of: human tissue research and biobanking; patenting in biomedicine and genomics; organ transplantation; medical end-of-life practices; neuroethics; and global justice. She has published more than 150 articles, book chapters and books on these issues, including the co-authored book Exclusions from Patentability (Cambridge, 2012) and the co-edited volume Continuous Sedation at the End of Life: Ethical, Clinical and Legal Perspectives (Cambridge, 2013). Sigrid also serves on various advisory committees, including the Ethics Committee of the Universiteit Gent Hospital.Donna Dickenson is the author of one of the earliest books taking a balanced critical stance on personalised medicine, Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good (2013). She is Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London and Research Associate at the HeLEX Centre at the University of Oxford. Previously she taught at Imperial College School of Medicine, London. For many years she served on the Ethics Committee of the UK Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. She has written or edited twenty-five books, as well as over one hundred articles or chapters. In 2006 she became the first woman to win the international Spinoza Lens Award for her contribution to public debate on current ethical issues about the impact of biotechnology on our society.
Summary
Personalised medicine is often presented as a beneficial revolution, but raises problems about the ownership of genetic information, reduce individual choice, undermine resources for public health and divert attention from the common good. Suitable for readers interested in the development and promotion of individually-tailored medical treatments.
