Mission statement

Biomedicine and biotechnology are changing our world, our lives, and ourselves

The LSE’s BIOS Centre harnesses the interdisciplinary resources of the world’s leading social science university to address the challenges posed by developments in the life sciences and biomedicine.

Developments in the life sciences and biomedicine are

• Increasing our ability to control our own biology – our bodies and our brains
• Enabling us to create novel life forms and forms of life
• Changing our ideas of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’
• Transforming our understanding of personal identity, family relations, ancestry and ‘race’
• Altering our social and personal expectations and responsibilities
• Reshaping global economic opportunities and impacting on global inequalities
• Creating new national and international security challenges
• Creating new social, ethical, legal and regulatory dilemmas.

BIOS aims

• To work with life scientists, clinicians and policy makers at all stages from basic research to applications and regulation
• To produce empirically grounded, conceptually rich and policy relevant research
• To analyse the social, ethical and clinical challenges faced by patients, politicians, professionals and regulators to help create best practice
• To promote collaboration between social scientists, life scientists, clinicians and policy makers
• To develop evidence-based approaches to the governance of biomedicine and the life sciences
• To build capacity world-wide in the social study of the life sciences by training masters and research students and collaborating with researchers from across the world
• To develop the methodologies to understand the new relations between the life sciences and society - locally, nationally and globally
• To build public engagement with the dilemmas posed by our ability to control our biology.

Our key research areas are

• New reproductive technologies, regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies
• The new sciences of brain and mind and the implications of new psychiatric drugs, brain imaging and neurotechnologies for the control of behaviour in children and adults
• The social life of genomics – personalised genomics and predictive genetic testing for common disorders
• Biosecurity – the new practices of identification based on biometrics and predictive profiling and the security challenges posed by synthetic biology
• Bioeconomies – the governance of the global bioeconomy and its implications for global justice
• Biopolitics and the transformation of ideas of citizenship and identity.

Who we work with – some examples

• Nuffield Council on Bioethics
• Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
• Wellcome Trust
• Medical Research Council
• National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
• UK Stem Cell Bank
• European Neuroscience and Society Network
• Norwegian Committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Genomics (ELSA)
• British Medical Association Medical Ethics Committee

Events

Latest News