The Ramazzini Institute
for Occupational and Environmental Health Research   

Who Are We?

     The fifth in a series of conferences on Genetics and Ethics in the 21^st century was held July 21 to 23 at The Given Institute of the University of Colorado in Aspen. The conference this year was on genetics and the workplace, with emphasis on genetic testing for susceptibility to Chronic Beryllium Disease and Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. An unusual group of over 60 participants, drawn from industry, labor, insurance, government, philosophy, law, medicine, basic science and genetic disorder support groups, the meeting was organized by the University’s medical ethicist, Mark Yarborough with the advice of Dr. Lee Newman, Director of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the National Jewish Research Medical Center in Denver .

     It is not by chance that Professor Yarborough and Dr, Robert Sandhaus are Contributing Editors of GEE!  Or that Nancye Buelow is a guest writer in our first issue. They all shared the magic of Aspen! It is rare that in the space of two days a group that had never met before, who were mostly strangers to one another, and who came with such disparate backgrounds and interests, could find a common language and grapple productively on very difficult moral, social, economic and scientific issues. Perhaps the force of the prospect of routine genetic testing, not in the future, but now, resulted in just the right amount of creative pressure.

     In any case, a project of the Ramazzini Institute on the drawing board for a year, this journal, was quickly revised to accommodate a set of connections not usually made, yet connections vital to make.

     The objective of this feature of our journal is to communicate the essence of those two days, in two ways: web dissemination of selected papers, including a summary of a well-done mock corporate board meeting, and a continuing effort to bring the substance and spirit of the Aspen dialectic onto this site for the cyber world to share. With the help of Mark, Sandy, Nancye and others who were in Aspen this year, those papers, and essays and dialogue yet to be written, will be available to all of us. 

     In this issue, we start with the reproduction of two instructive charts from a presentation in Aspen by Richard R. Sharp, biomedical ethicist for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. We hope to bring you the whole of Dr. Sharp’s paper in a later issue of GEE! The charts are published now to help us begin to develop a set of understandings we can share. There is a great deal of confusion about the meaning of the genetic differences that make us each unique.  These or similar charts will be displayed in every issue of this journal to serve as a touchstone or source of definitions we can accept if only for the sake of discussion, of terms easily and continually confused in the casual language of the hot rhetoric on the interface of genetic and environmental public policies.