On Monday, August 1, 2010 at 3:00p.m., Ibrahim Garba will present “Personalized Medicine and Public Health: Can Human Rights Mediate A Perennial Feud?” The presentation will be held at the HITS building, 410 W. Tenth Street, in Room 3139.

Abstract: The ethical principles guiding public health and genomic medicine are often in tension: whereas public health practice adopts collectivist principles that emphasize population-based benefits, recent advances in genomic/personalized medicine are grounded in an individualist ethic that privileges informed consent and balancing individual risks and benefits.  Research biobanks are an important component of genomic medicine and banked tissue has had a long history of being used for public health. But despite the collectivist approach of public health, the ethical principles applied to biobanking (e.g. informed consent, autonomy, privacy) remain individualist.  Human rights have been proposed as a framework for public health ethics.  The goal of the presentation is to evaluate the potential of human rights to address this tension in the context of biobanking.