The law…is not just syntax for practitioners but also how society talks about justice and power.

Hong Kong, 2005, SARS epi­demic. Must you report your symptoms if as a consequence you will lose you job? As a doctor, do you treat patients suspected of having SARS despite the high rate of infection? Can the government release the names of the neighborhoods that have been hard­est hit to the public? These are some of the ethical quandaries considered in “The SARS Epidemic in Hong Kong 2003: In­terplay of Law, Medicine, and Ethics” by Edwin Hui, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, in a new anthology, The Nexus of Law and Biology, edited by Barbara Ann Hocking.

I looked at this volume, slim but full of subjects for thought, from the per­spective of what it offers lay (non-lawyer) denizens of the bioethics neighborhood. That may seem to be a peculiar burden for a book with specialized articles on international common law and statutes (and sometimes correspondingly dense prose), but a fair standard given that the editor and some of the authors expressly frame that accessible usefulness as a goal. The law, as the articles emphasize in dif­ferent ways, is not just syntax for practi­tioners but also how society talks about justice and power. I am not qualified to comment on how fair the selections are with regard to the law, but the book has prompted me to think more – and dif­ferently – about the issues raised, so as added value to current bioethics debates, the book succeeds grandly.

The anthology provides a snapshot of the current intersection of biology and law, be it environmental liability for the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), consent in genetic research, or protocols for biological war­fare. As is inevitable, some of the articles are more concise and less encumbered by legal jargon than others. As the Austra­lian judge Michael Kirby writes in his in­troduction, “The essential link [between the articles] is the mysterious phenom­enon of biological life, made even more puzzling when consciousness, intelligence and the moral sense emerge in the higher life forms.”

For those looking more to the law flavoring, I particularly suggest this book if your focus is on currents outside of United States shores. Editor Hocking is an assistant law professor at the Queen­sland University of Technology and the University of Tasmania, and the anthol­ogy accordingly focuses more on interna­tional, British, and Australian law than on the American legal system. Christopher Rodgers, a professor at the University of Newcastle, UK, in his article “Mediating Law and Biology?,” indeed specifically maligns the United States for not signing the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, for that leaves as governing international law the looser and less extensive Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary (SPS) agreement of the WTO to assess the risk of GMOs.

One of the strongest pieces in the anthology is “Indigenous Peoples and Genetic Population Research: Reflections on a Culturally Appropriate Model of In­digenous Participant Consent” by Helena Kajlich, a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania. Kajlich argues that current genetic population studies must obtain a culturally resonant form of consent if indigenous peoples are to participate voluntarily and with full information in ge­netic research. Kajlich also contends that researchers should only be able to harvest genetic data if they obtain “group” per­mission; taking samples from individuals when the group has not given approval violates the consent of the group to be subject to research. The article is concise, presenting four different consent meth­odologies and evaluating the pros and cons of each. Kajlich urges that genome research include ongoing consent – con­sent at every step of the process – and “creative and innovative methodologies by which indigenous peoples can main­tain, control, protect and develop their biological resources.” Kajlich engages the reader to examine closely the precise relational tie between harvesting of medi­cal information and its uses and the role that consent should play at each iteration, and draws the reader’s attention to the el­ement of group approval.

Other pieces are touch more esoter­ic if no less intriguing. In “A Proposal Based on ‘The Tragedy of the Com­mons’: A Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property Rights and the Pub­lic Domain,” Joseph Henry Vogel, a pro­fessor at the University of Puerto Rico, argues that a museum dedicated to dis­cussing biological innovations and legal rights would allow the public sphere to become a domain for discussing these issues – that is, the public would be in­formed and able to participate in an on­going discussion about bioethical dilem­mas. He lobbies for Puerto Rico as an ideal place to build that museum because of its scientific research, lack of another science museum, bilingual citizens, and “pristine” natural reserves, among other factors. But does Vogel really think that could happen? Vogel does acknowledge that there is a “bricks and mortar” (read dollars) component to a museum. While that challenge remains, he raises a press­ing problem: how can we create relevant and meaningful discussion in the public sphere about these issues? As we are see­ing with the current healthcare debate in the U.S., these matters tend to become distorted in the media without the type of reflection to which this book aspires.

For a book which covers plenty of is­sues, a key is the organization of the table of contents, index, and bibliography, so that after an idea is implanted in the read­er’s conscious it is readily recallable. On this, this volume does well.

But therein lies the rub in this anthol­ogy: for whom will this book find its best use, either initially or as a reference for the future? Would an ordinary citizen not professionally involved in some way with bioethics likely be able to understand this book? No, not least because of the le­galese in some of the articles. Yet many of the authors in this anthology admira­bly advocate public debate about these issues. Hocking and Vogel attempt to harmonize the academic nature of the anthology with more democratic goals in the last chapter in the anthology, appro­priately named “Shuffling the Law and Biology iPod,” in which they name vari­ous novels, plays, and movies that pro­vide a window into cultural perception of biological development and its ethical im­plications. Popular media, they suggest, seems to be the only way to connect with larger swaths of population. Moreover, the anthology solely deals with traditional Western notions of the individual and of the role of law. Except for the article on consent, there is no mention of other re­ligious and cultural contributions towards achieving international standards of eth­ics.

Yet here is a good book that raises issues of regulating technology, the phy­sician-patient relation on an individual and community scale, and forming global ethical principles in the face of economic, religious, and cultural differences. As Jus­tice Kirby concludes, “To do nothing is to make a decision.” Until these debates can be heard across spectrums, however, the ideas and critiques here of current systems of law for dealing with new bio­logical issues will remain hypothetical, for more academic ears only.