Facebook and other social networking sites. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing. A taxonomy for empirical bioethics.

The issues were so important, so numerous, and so overwhelming that it took a special DOUBLE issue of AJOB to cover them all. The response from the field, and from those outside bioethics, was so voluminous in regard to a single topic–empirical bioethics–that a single Target Article by Alexander Kon has 18 Open Peer Commentaries.

Social networking and direct-to-consumer genetic testing will change everything about how we understand our individual and our social health–or at least that is the theory advanced by some. New empirical data found by researchers from Baylor College of Medicine suggests that patients express interest in wanting personalized genome testing and that they expect their physicians to be able to interpret their results.

It also may change entirely how we do genomics “Research 2.0” and how we share information whether as researcher, patient, or the government, say authors Soo-Jin Lee and Crowley.

Visit bioethics.net to read the June-July issue of The American Journal of Bioethics and consider some of the most cutting edge issues of the day examined by the top scholars in the field.

Summer Johnson, PhD