Essentially, the term 'biobank' can be defined in different ways. Taking the UK Biobank's experience as the main example, the Taiwan Biobank aims to collect the DNA of a large group of people on the population base and track their health and lifestyle for at least 10 years. It is hoped that the information collected, regarding the mechanisms underlying how genes and environmental factors interact with each other to make us ill, will benefit the society in various ways, including the exploration of a new generation of treatments, support to preventive medicine discovery and also the possible benefits for the promotion of evolving public health-related industries in Taiwan. However, the involvement of large-scale population base gene data collection also triggered serious ethical, legal and social issues. In Taiwan, the challenge is even more serious than for any other biobanking experiences that have occurred previously. Among all the ethical, legal and social issues, the convergence of aboriginal people protection provided under Taiwan's Constitution imposes on the research team an obligation to create an innovative Ethical & Legal Governance Framework adaptable to the unique social background of Taiwan, including a workable public consultation/communication mechanism. In early 2005, the creation of the 'Taiwan Biobank' has been included as a part of Taiwan's strategic development in promoting the country as an island of biomedicine. In this report, the ideology, the goals and special features, government strategy, visions and, in particular, the ethical, legal and social issue planning of the Taiwan Biobank will be briefly introduced and reviewed.
The Taiwan Biobank (TWB) is a biomedical research database of biopsy data from 200 000 participants. Access to this database has been granted to research communities taking part in the development of precision medicines; however, this has raised issues surrounding TWB’s access to electronic medical records (EMRs). The Personal Data Protection Act of Taiwan restricts access to EMRs for purposes not covered by patients’ original consent. This commentary explores possible legal solutions to help ensure that the access TWB has to EMR abides with legal obligations, and with governance frameworks associated with ethical, legal, and social implications. We suggest utilizing “hash function” algorithms to create nonretrospective, anonymized data for the purpose of cross-transmission and/or linkage with EMR.
The allocation of carbon dioxide emission allowances has become one of the most important global issues. The main argument is the equity in the allocation of emission allowances. If the allocation is unfair, then economic development of some countries will be impeded. Therefore, to promote an emissions trading system, an equitable and reasonable allocation method that benefits every participant country is needed, so that countries will accept and implement the system accordingly.This study uses emission allowance as an input variable for evaluation and analysis. The output variables are energy consumption, government spending, and gross domestic product, based on the model developed by Gomes and Lins (2008). The study takes the zero sum game data envelopment analysis model to explore the allocation of emission allowances and the reallocation of emission allowances among 24 European Union members, hoping to find a comparatively fair and efficient allocation method for them. The empirical results show that first, the current allocation of emission allowances is inefficient. Second, after reallocation, those countries which implemented it most efficiently have more allowances. andThird, after the reallocation, G8 countries including the United Kingdom, France, and Italy have higher allowances than their initial allowences, implying that industrialized countries need more allowances to maintain their economic growth.
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