The American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics takes great pride in the loyalty and friendship of our many members and readers. We view our members and readers collectively as a family, and above all else we work every day to earn your loyalty and trust. Our society would not exist without all of you. Part of that work is done by making certain that our loyal friends receive good value for the hard-earned money you all invest in us. With regards to the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, that means ensuring each issue is packed with the best, most thoughtful, and most current work we can share with all of you.
We are reasonably confident that we have provided you with good value in our most recent issues of JLME. In our winter volume we actually presented three separate symposiums, two in our regular issue and one in a standalone supplement. With this, our spring volume, and our first publication of the 2020s, we bring you two more collections, both edited by longtime friends of the Society. The first, “LawSeq: Building a Sound Legal Foundation for Translating Genomics into Clinical Application,” is the outgrowth of tremendous work done at the University of Minnesota and is guest-edited by Susan M. Wolf, Ellen Wright Clayton, and Frances Lawrenz. Susan, who has edited many issue of JLME for us, writes in her introduction that “The goal of this Symposium is to analyze how law supports and impedes genomics implementation and to recommend changes to advance successful integration of genomics into clinical care.” Our second symposium also considers how law interacts with technology, as JLME stalwart Mark Rothstein presents “Unregulated Health Research Using Mobile Devices.” Mark writes that “both regulated and unregulated researchers increasingly have utilized smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices in recruitment, enrollment, data gathering and analysis, and dissemination of research findings. Mobile devices and their software applications facilitate the enrollment of large cohorts and enable participants to record a range of biometric and other measures. Both research platforms and health apps can play an important role in ensuring the scientific accuracy of the research and safeguarding the wellbeing of research participants. We investigated how the interests of participants, researchers, and the public can be addressed in an unregulated environment.” Together we hope these fascinating collections, along with our usual independent articles and columns, will provide you with enough reading to get you to our summer issue, which we are ever-hopefully reminded is right around the corner. In the meantime, thank you as always for your support of the work of ASLME.
