At the Institute.

• Author: Bailey, Tracey M.

We are very pleased to publish this special edition of the Health Law Review which is comprised of articles resulting from a Canadian Network for the Governance of Ethical Health Research Involving Humans' retreat held in the summer of 2008. Michael McDonald's introduction provides an excellent overview of this issue.

By the time we go to press our new website will be launched. We hope you take a look and find timely information on issues in health law, as well as details of current activities and research at the Health Law Institute. We look forward to receiving comments from our users as we continue to work to ensure this is a useful resource, www.law.ualberta.ca/centres/hli

On the conference front, Robyn Hyde-Lay, GEL (3) S Project Manager, is coordinating the 5th International Conference on DNA Sampling being held September 16-18, 2009 at the Rimrock Hotel in Banff, Alberta. The conference title is "The Age of Personalized Genomics" and is being organized by a team led by Professor Timothy Caulfield. The line-up of internationally acclaimed speakers means this promises to be a not-to-be missed event for everyone interested in this timely issue, including governments, policy makers, NGOs, academics, and practitioners in law, health care and the sciences. Specific information regarding the conference and the call for abstracts is available at www.genomealberta.ca/APG.

The line up of speakers in the last few months of our seminar series was amazing. We started the New Year with a panel on Bill 52, introduced into the Alberta Legislature to amend the Health Information Act. Frank Work, Q.C., the Privacy Commissioner of Alberta; Dr. Brendan Bunting, former President of the Alberta Medical Association; Dr. Trevor Theman, Registrar of the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Ms. Wendy Armstrong, with the Alberta chapter of the Consumers' Association of Canada, all weighed in on changes that would see major shifts in the way health information is handled in the context of electronic health records and data repositories. Professor Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University, an internationally recognized expert in public health law, spoke to the ethical and pragmatic imperative of wealthy nations to work towards a global framework for health in developing countries. Mary Anne Bobinski, Dean of Law at the University of British Columbia, provided a compelling comparison of health care reform in Canada and the U.S. with a focus on two cases...