Research reports that illustrate this cross-cutting theme at the ELSI Congress can be clustered into four overlapping sets of social/scientific negotiations, each focusing on a different aspect of translational genomic research: its orienting goals, its driving hypotheses, its methods for acquiring human genetic material, and the rules governing its transactions with the human sources of that material. This is not surprising, since each of these features is critical to the progress of the research, and each involves important normative choices: that is, value judgments about what directions the research should take and how it should proceed. In the case of translational genomic research, however, the questions raised by each of these four features are particularly vexing.
