Testing times ahead

Professor Roger Brownsword and Jeffrey Wale from the Centre for Conflict, Rule of Law and Society have published two research outputs concerning the regulation of prenatal testing.

The first is an article ‘Testing Times Ahead: Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing and the Kind of Community that We Want to Be’ published in the Modern Law Review. This article reviews the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ report on Non‐Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT); and introduces two general questions provoked by the report – concerning, respectively, the nature and extent of the informational interests that are to be recognised in today’s ‘information societies’ and the membership of today’s ‘genetic societies’. The article also considers the role and nature of the Nuffield Council and is part of a wider departmental project on the framing and regulation of informational interests.

A second research output has been published in ‘Medicine, Law and the Internet’.  The chapter  ‘Regulating in the Global Village: The Case of Non-Invasive Pre-Natal Tests’ highlights and seeks to address some of the issues presented by the use of NIPT technology in an online and multi jurisdictional environment.  This publication follows a presentation by Jeffrey Wale at a conference organised by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the Laboratory for the Research of Medical Law and Bioethics and the Medical and Bar Associations of Thessaloniki in May 2017.