Eric T. Juengst, PhD

Professor, Department of Genetics
Professor, Department of Social Medicine

Director, Center for Biomedical Ethics

Research Interests

Key words: ethical, legal and social issues in human genetics and genomics

“Personalized genomic medicine” (PGM) is being promoted as a “new paradigm for health care” and a major goal for translational genomic research (TGR). In addition to overcoming TGR’s remaining scientific hurdles, achieving that goal will involve addressing a number of ethical, legal and social challenges. Some of those challenges reflect the ways that different social policies and health care economies will complicate TGR’s ability to realize PGM as a viable health care paradigm. But other challenges might emerge from the goal itself, depending on how PGM is interpreted by those who shape it as a social practice. Our research explores this suggestion by documenting how how some of the most influential parties in promoting, implementing, providing and using “personalized genomic medicine” understand its promises and potential pitfalls, in order to draw out the policy choices that lie ahead for researchers, health care providers and the public as translational genomic research moves closer to its goal.

We focus on four sets of interpreters that will have particularly important roles in shaping the way PGM emerges as a social practice: (1) the scientists, research sponsors, companies, and policy organizations that promote PGM as a biomedical paradigm; (2) the journals, public review bodies and educational institutions that mediate the implementation of this paradigm; (3) the health care institutions and professionals that pioneer the paradigm by providing PGM services in practice; and (4) the patient-based organizations that increasingly help shape its public reception. Our empirical studies of the views of these social co-producers of PGM will then be used to generate an analytic map of their different visions, designed to draw out their ethical legal and social implications for TGR and health policy. The “translational pipeline” of genomic research will have many branches towards its distal end. This project is designed to anticipate the directional choices that these branches will require, so that the PGM that TGR finally delivers into the complicated plumbing of our society is as clean and safe as possible.

Publications

Lab Members

Contact Information

Mailing Address:

CB# 7240
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7264

Office: 454 MacNider Hall
Office phone: 919-962-4340
FAX: 919-966-7499

Email: Eric T. Juengst, PhD