Date:
Location:
Food Ethics Symposium
(following a lecture by Lawrence Lessig on Institutional Corrupton at 7pm on March 28, 2012)
The symposium will explore challenges to the integrity of health-related food research resulting from industry sponsorship of this research. (The focus of the symposium will be research on functional foods–that is, foods marketed for purported health benefits above and beyond basic nutrition). Participants will address a number of issues including the distortion of research agendas, the risk of bias, impacts on the interpretation of nutrition studies, and related concerns. They will also examine the ethical implications of industry-funded research for the academy, editors and peer reviewers of nutrition journals, professional associations, and patient advocacy organizations. Finally, participants will explore the potential policy implications of these issues, and lay the foundations for the analysis of some principled policy responses.
This symposium is part of a collaborative research project jointly funded by the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State, through its Bioethics Initiative, and by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard through its Lab on Institutional Corruption. This symposium builds on an earlier workshop entitled "Industry-Sponsored Research on Food and Health: Ethical Challenges and Policy Implications" held at Penn State in March 2008, and on research conducted during 2010-12 as part of this research collaboration. For further information, please contact Jonathan H. Marks, Non-residential Fellow at the Center, and Director of the Bioethics Program at Penn State. He can be reached at marks@psu.edu.