The 'Governing Genetic Databases' project was funded under the Wellcome Trust's Biomedical Ethics program (2006-2009). This project took a socio-legal approach to analyse the framework for regulating medical research in the UK and how this accommodated biobanks. The project was based at the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford.
The principal investigators were Professor Mike Parker, Dr. Jane Kaye, University of Oxford and Dr. Andrew Smart of Bath Spa University.
This project and the legal research was co-ordinated by Dr. Jane Kaye, with Dr. Andrew Smart being responsible for the empirical research and Prof. Mike Parker carrying out the ethical research. The person responsible for the legal research was Dr. Sue Gibbons while Dr. Catherine Heeney conducted the sociological research. The results of this research will be published by Hart Publishers in 2010 as a book called Governing Biobanks: Understanding the Interplay between Law and Practice.
During the life of this project we held a Legal Workshop for practitioners in the field and held an International Conference called Governing Biobanks - What are the Challenges? with the Centre for Law and Genetics at the University of Tasmania in Australia. Dr. Sue Gibbons also organised two seminar series and edited the special issues of the papers in the Kings Law Journal in 2007 and Medical Law International in 2008. In addition, we gave a number of conference presentations and published a number of other papers.