Dr Emily Postan authors new book on identity and health data ethics
Fri 15 July 2022
Dr Emily Postan, Chancellor’s Fellow in Bioethics and Deputy Director of the J Kenyon Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law, has recently published her monograph “Embodied Narratives: Protecting identity interests through ethical governance of bioinformation” with Cambridge University Press.
As increasing quantities of health and biological information are generated, the need for us all to consider the human impacts of its ubiquity becomes more urgent than ever. “Embodied Narratives” explains the ethical imperative to take seriously the potential impacts on our identities of encountering bioinformation about ourselves.
The book offers a conceptually and ethically robust picture of the effects on our identities of accessing bioinformation about ourselves. It argues for the considerable identity-significance of this information, while firmly rejecting the idea that identity is determined by biology. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigating and characterising the nature of identity interests, providing an account that is accessible to readers from diverse disciplines and illustrated by evidence-based examples. It speaks to bioethicists, to philosophers of identity, and to lawyers, regulators, policy-makers, healthcare professionals and health researchers who are responsible for making ethical decisions about information disclosures.
Speaking of the book, Prof Jackie Leach Scully of the University of New South Wales, said: “The appearance of Embodied Narratives is a milestone in the development of data ethics and in building a deep understanding of how technology can change individual and collective identities."
The Open Access version of “Embodied Narratives: Protecting identity interests through ethical governance of bioinformation” is available on Cambridge University Press website.