Marketing the Research Missions of Academic Medical Centers: Why Messages Blurring Lines Between Clinical Care and Research Are Bad for both Business and Ethics.

Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) offer patient care and perform research. Increasingly, AMCs advertise to the public in order to garner income that can support these dual missions. In what follows, we raise concerns about the ways that advertising blurs important distinctions between them. Such blurring is detrimental to AMC efforts to fulfill critically important ethical responsibilities pertaining both to science communication and clinical research, because marketing campaigns can employ hype that weakens research integrity and contributes to therapeutic misconception and misestimation, undermining the informed consent process that is essential to the ethical conduct of research. We offer ethical analysis of common advertising practices that justify these concerns. We also suggest the need for a deliberative body convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges and others to develop a set of voluntary guidelines that AMCs can use to avoid in the future, the problems found in many current AMC advertising practices.

New Metaphors for New Understandings of Genomes.

New techniques have made genome modification cheaper, easier, and faster, leading to a boom in research, especially for biomedical uses. Given the scope and potential power of this research and its applications, people need accurate information about what is being done or proposed, and why, and what the social and political implications might be. Metaphors can be useful in explaining complex topics, as they present the new in terms of the familiar. However, they can also misrepresent both how genomes and bodies work and the social and political implications of research and applications. Existing research shows that this is happening and that we need new language. However, it is not always easy to decide whether an alternative does rhetorical work that will empower publics, patients, biologists, and physicians alike. This article offers a conceptual framework for developing, analyzing, critiquing, and choosing new metaphors that will help improve communication about genomes and genomic research.