Links to some further information on the regulation and ethical issues of biotech.

There is a vast collection of Web opinion, fact, fiction and myth about the ethics and regulation of biotechnology. The following are pages related to the way that the technology and its application are actually regulated.

On clinical trials, drugs and so on:-

• The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A huge site, but has some useful material for every level from consumers to doctors.
• The Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the UK counterpart of the FDA. (There is a European counterpart as well, the European Medicines Agency, but it does not have as much material for the non-technical specialist on it).

On other aspects of biotechnology regulation, see

• The Canadian Government's site on Bioregulation, which provides a range of material on regulation of agricultural, food and industrial biotech as well as drugs
• The USDA, which oversees agriculture in the US.
• European Commission site on their debate on the role of genetic technologies in Europe. This is as much about the processf of debate as the conclusions, but interesting to see how the institutions of the EU handle the topic.

Sites that are opposed to biotechnology generally focus on agricultural biotech and stem cell research. Among these I would suggest

• GreenPeace and Friends of the Earth, mainstream political pressure groups which oppose GM technology along with other things.
• Safe Food Org - anti-GM in crops, quite a good collection of anti-GM stories (the stories themselves are full of errors, omissions and distortions, but the collection is quite comprehensive)
• President's council on bioethics - generally technologically and socially conservative, and specifically not keen on stem cells, cloning and some biotherapeutic applications

Ethical issues on biotechnology tend to spread into ethical issues on 'animal rights', ethics of experimentation (on animals), and political issues such as trade tarifs and barriers. Much of the ethical debate is dominated by the 'Yuk Factor', our distaste for manipulation of what we hold dear, which is not a bad ethical standard to stick with. A few of the more responsible sites debating these issues include