With great science comes great responsibility to ensure various aspects of the research are considered. In partcular, the economic, legal, societal, ethical, environmental impacts need to be addressed.
Genome Praire and Genome Canada work to ensure that each of their projects examines the impacts on society. Each project contains a smaller research project on the societal and/or ethical issues of genomics research.
Genome Prairie has taken a lead role in studying the impacts of agricultural genomics reseach. The Value Addition Through Genomics and GE3LS (VALGEN) project team is investigating how Canada can benefit from applications of agricultural genomics, a new science which studies the effects of the entire set of genes making up a particular organism such as our familiar crops of wheat, flax, canola and corn. The project focuses on three crucial factors that affect how scientific discoveries make their way from laboratory to the marketplace. To learn more, visit http://valgen.ca/ .