While they are brought into dramatic focus by the lens of human genome research, conceptual uncertainties about how we should understand health, illness, individual human identity, and the connections between these ideas and the human groups into which we sort ourselves for social, political, and scientific reasons, are important challenges for all biomedical research. They are important because they implicate the goals of the research enterprise, its foundational assumptions, and its driving hypotheses. Moreover, the ELSI research presented at the 2011 Congress suggests that they are not uncertainties that can be resolved through science alone. Rather, as critical as they are to scientific priority-setting and direction, they ultimately are uncertainties that can only be resolved socially, through negotiation between the many different parties they implicate.
