Ethical, social, and legal implications of advanced research for health

ARPA-H, the federal agency charged with “supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society's most challenging health problems,” released a request for ideas for its Ethical, Legal, and Social Implication’s (ELSI) Initiative. We took a moment to share our thoughts:

  • the ‘product environment’ of everyday products and services is a major driver of health by shaping health behavior;

  • given all of the attention and resources paid to mitigating the consequences of an unhealthy environment and to helping individuals overcome that environment, why would we not seek to make that environment less harmful?

  • an over-indexing on downstream biomedical innovations can divert resources from and detract from solving problems at their roots and, perversely, can make the root causes more deeply embedded;

  • there are opportunities for research and innovation that would help us better understand, model and track progress on health behaviors and chronic illnesses at a population level.

Read our full response.

Steve Downs