Calvin WL Ho

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at Monash University (Australia)

The World Congress of Bioethics held in Qatar in 2024 (WCB 2024) sparked controversy around the role of religion in bioethics, highlighting the need for critical discussions. During the congress, there was a strong push for incorporating religious values into bioethical discourse, raising questions about the validity and implications of such an app...

Background During health emergencies, effective infodemic management has become a paramount challenge. A new era marked by a rapidly changing information ecosystem, combined with the widespread dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, has magnified the complexity of the issue. For infodemic management measures to be effective, acceptable...

Many countries consider long-term implications for society

With focus on the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the digital health context, we consider the following questions: How does the European Union (EU) seek to facilitate the development and uptake of trustworthy AI systems through the AI Act? What does trustworthiness and trust mean in the AI Act, and how are they linked...

BACKGROUND During health emergencies, effective infodemic management has become a paramount challenge. A new era marked by a rapidly changing information ecosystem, combined with the widespread dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, has magnified the complexity of the issue. For infodemic management measures to be effective, acceptable...

Issue Successful response to an infodemic requires social listening and integrated analysis to produce infodemic insights by identifying questions, concerns, information voids and circulating narratives including health misinformation. There is currently a wide variation in social listening and infodemic insights generation practices, and a lack of...

Artificial intelligence (AI) enables a medical device to optimize its performance through machine learning (ML), including the ability to learn from past experiences. In healthcare, ML is currently applied within controlled settings in devices to diagnose conditions like diabetic retinopathy without clinician input, for instance. In order to allow...

Objective: To assess the comparability of international ethics principles and practices used in regulating pediatric research as a first step in determining whether reciprocal deference for international ethics review is feasible. Prior studies by the authors focused on other aspects of international health research, such as biobanks and direct-to...

Background: The promise of biobanking and genetic research (BGR) in the context of translational research towards improving public health and personalised medicine has been recognised in India. Worldwide experience has shown that incorporating stakeholders’ expectations and values into the governance of BGR is essential to address ethical aspects o...

The operationalization of One Health (OH) through digitalization is a means to deploy digital technologies (including Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data and related digital technologies) to better capacitate us to deal with growing climate exigency and related threats to human, animal and plant health. With reference to the concept of One Digit...

International biomedical research, in which projects span borders and engage participants from multiple countries, has increased substantially during the last several decades. Despite the proven value of large, geographically, and ethnically diverse studies, further advancements are being impeded by the burden of submitting separate, and often nume...

Background: The promise of biobanking and genetic research (BGR) in the context of translational research towards improving public health and personalised medicine has been recognised in India. Worldwide experience has shown that incorporating stakeholders’ expectations and values into the governance of BGR is essential to address ethical aspects o...

Single-site review means protection and efficiency.

While the degree of COVID-19 vaccine accessibility and uptake varies at both national and global levels, increasing vaccination coverage raises questions regarding the standard of prevention that ought to apply to different settings where COVID-19 vaccine trials are hosted. A WHO Expert Group has developed guidance on the ethical permissibility of...

Graeme Laurie stepped down from the Chair in Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. This edited collection pays tribute to his extraordinary contributions to the field. Graeme often spoke about the importance of 'legacy' in academic work and forged a remarkable intellectual legacy of his own, notably through his work on genet...

The basis of medico-legal claims against a doctor may occur in contract law, tort law or criminal law. This chapter focuses on the ethical and legal requirement of informed consent, which in tort law relates to two legal actions, namely trespass to persons (or battery) and negligence, as they give effect to a patient’s right to autonomous decision-...

Research, innovation, and progress in the life sciences are increasingly contingent on access to large quantities of data. This is one of the key premises behind the “open science” movement and the global calls for fostering the sharing of personal data, datasets, and research results. This paper reports on the outcomes of discussions by the panel...

The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) is a multistakeholder initiative quickly constructed in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic to respond to a catastrophic breakdown in global cooperation. ACT-A is now the largest international effort to achieve equitable access to COVID-19 health technologies, and its governance is a matter of...

Genomic science is increasingly central to the provision of health care. Producing and applying robust genomics knowledge is a complex endeavour in which no single individual, profession, discipline or community holds all the answers. Engagement and involvement of diverse stakeholders can support alignment of societal and scientific interests, unde...

Genetic discrimination (GD) is the differential or unfair profiling of an individual on the basis of genetic data. This article summarizes the actions of the Genetic Discrimination Observatory (GDO) in addressing GD and recent developments in GD since late 2020. It shows how GD can take many forms in today’s rapidly evolving society.

Our article aims to provide a comprehensive portrayal of how seven Asian jurisdictions have sought to address the challenge of genetic discrimination (GD) by presenting an analysis of the relevant legislation, policies, and practices. Based on our findings, policy discussion and action on preventing or mitigating GD have been narrowly framed in ter...

Digitalization in nephrology has progressed in a manner that is disparate and siloed, even though learning (under a broader Learning Health System initiative) has been manifested in all the main areas of clinical application. Most applications based on artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) are still in the initial developmental stages an...

Background: The development of biobanks is associated with the emergence of new ethical challenges. In Egypt, several biobanks have been established, but there are no specific local ethical guidelines to guide their work. The aim of this study is to develop recommendations for the Egyptian human biobanking ethical guidelines, which take into consid...

This chapter studies Hong Kong’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Hong Kong’s experience with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 helped to prepare the health system for a pandemic, allowing it to avoid a complete lockdown of the city. Social-distancing measures, aggressive testing, and contact tracing have also been cri...

Background: There is growing interest in advancing biobanking and genetic research in many countries, including India. Concurrently, more importance is being placed on participatory approaches involving the public and other stakeholders in addressing ethical issues and policymaking as part of a broader governance approach. We analyse the tools, pur...

Restrictive measures imposed because of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have resulted in severe social, economic and health effects. Some countries have considered the use of immunity certification as a strategy to relax these measures for people who have recovered from the infection by issuing these individuals a document, commonl...

Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts is an edited collection of original essays on Asia’s legal and policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, which, in a matter of months, swept around the globe, infecting millions. In a matter of weeks, the unimaginable became ordinary: lockdowns of cities and entire countries, physical distancing and quaran...

Background: The development of biobanks is associated with the emergence of new ethical challenges. In Egypt, several biobanks have been established, but there are no specific local ethical guidelines to guide their work. The aim of this study is to develop recommendations for the Egyptian human biobanking ethical guidelines, which take into consid...

Background: There is growing interest in advancing biobanking and genetic research in many countries, including India. Concurrently, more importance is being placed on participatory approaches involving the public and other stakeholders in addressing ethical issues and policymaking as part of a broader governance approach. We analyse the tools, pur...

Following the outbreak of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing measures were quickly introduced across East Asia—including drastic shelter-in-place orders in some cities—drawing on experience with the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) almost two decades ago. “Smart City” technologies and other digital tools...

Recognizing that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a serious threat to global public health, the World Health Organization (WHO) has adopted a Global Action Plan (GAP) at the May 2015 World Health Assembly. Underscoring that systematic misuse and overuse of drugs in human medicine and food production is a global public health concern, the GAP-AM...

Technological advances in big data (large amounts of highly varied data from many different sources that may be processed rapidly), data sciences and artificial intelligence can improve health-system functions and promote personalized care and public good. However, these technologies will not replace the fundamental components of the health system,...

Genetic discrimination is one of the most pervasive challenges resulting from research and development in human genetics. To collaboratively study and prevent this ethical issue, we established an international Genetic Discrimination Observatory comprising a network of researchers and stakeholders from more than 19 jurisdictions.

Unfortunately, the original version of this article has cited one of its references incorrectly. The in-text citation "Lajaunie and Morand 2018" should have been “Lajaunie and Mazzega 2018", and the correct bibliographic details are

Human Germline Genome Modification and the Right to Science - edited by Andrea Boggio January 2020

A vicious circle links lack of equitable access to health, and to the supply of poor-quality medicines, which amount to one-tenth of medicines available in low- and middle-income countries. The WHO introduced a new, public health-focused definition of substandard and falsified (SF) medicines, which offers opportunities for governments to broaden th...

This paper considers how ethical norms on sharing of human biological materials and related data in international policy documents diffuse from global forums to national policies and practices. With focus on the domestic policies of four countries (i.e. Guinea, Argentina, India and Malawi), this paper seeks to explain policy diffusion by broadly ap...

We seek to clarify and assess the underlying moral reasons for opposing all medically unnecessary genital cutting of female minors, no matter how severe. We find that within a Western medicolegal framework, these reasons are compelling. However, they do not only apply to female minors, but rather to non-consenting persons of any age irrespective of...

This chapter provides an analysis of the legal governance that applies to genome-editing technologies for human biomedical research and (somatic and germline) cell therapies in Singapore. Genome-editing technologies refer to a group of techniques that include CRISPR/Cas9, which is a technological tool by which gene locus can be altered to create a...

The hype over artificial intelligence (AI) has spawned claims that clinicians (particularly radiologists) will become redundant. It is still moot as to whether AI will replace radiologists in day-to-day clinical practice, but more AI applications are expected to be incorporated into the workflows in the foreseeable future. These applications could...

This poster reports on a policy and literature review that was conducted as part of a larger empirical study to assess the state of ethical and professional governance of routine healthcare service delivery in 10 countries, namely Cambodia, China, Fiji, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore,...

Mortimer and colleagues (Mortimer et al. 2018) provide an instructive illustration of how philosophical analysis could be applied to examine the underlying values and assumptions in public policy on early intervention (EI) aimed at children or families at risk of poor health in the United Kingdom. Through examining a corpus of policy documents on t...

Open Peer Commentary to Mortimer R., A. McKeown, and I. Singh. 2018. Just policy? An ethical analysis of early intervention policy guidance. American Journal of Bioethics 18(11): 63-65. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2018.1523497

This poster presents the the findings from thematic analysis of the reflective writings of Singapore medical students who attended the Migrant Worker (HealthServe) Selective. The main themes were "Discovery of the other", the "Discovery of self", and "Our common humanity" A quote that exemplifies students experience “They are individuals just li...

We are pleased to present the final issue for this calendar year, which has biobanking as a special theme. A number of the original papers that are published in this issue were presented at the Asian Bioethics Review Conference in May 2017, and all of them reflect ongoing discussions on the subject across and beyond the Asian and Pacific regions. [...

A 10-year (2002 to 2011) retrospective analysis of consent documentation for the donation of leftover or residual human tissue from surgical interventions at a major academic healthcare institution in Singapore was conducted. Findings suggest that demographics like gender, religious belief and socioeconomic status could be indicators of the willing...

Research on emerging infectious diseases calls for a work on collections of pathogens (including hosts or vectors from which the pathogens were isolated), related to human and animal health, to wildlife or on the environmental material. In this respect, the adoption of a One Health perspective is determined by the need for a common approach to cons...

On Sunday the 6th of August 2017, the Global Health Ethics Unit of the World Health Organization (WHO) organised a pre-conference workshop on ‘The Ethics of Epidemics, Research and Surveillance’, as part of the 9th TEPHINET Global Scientific Conference, which was held from the 7th until the 11th of August at the Empress Hotel and Convention Centre...

In countries without universal health insurance systems, is it ethically acceptable for pharmaceutical companies to sell their products only to the relatively small segment of the population that can afford private insurance coverage or to pay for medications out of pocket? Are there certain drugs that companies should be expected to sell in these...

This paper begins by considering how the revised CIOMS guidelines have progressed beyond a mere labelling approach in the handling of vulnerability. However, progress is limited as the guidelines remain fixated on voluntariness and harm reduction or prevention. Although these are important considerations, vulnerability could also serve as a robust...

What is 'legal' about bioethics? What are the ideas and artefacts that bioethics encompasses, and how are they related to law? What is the role of law in bioethics? In this work, Calvin Ho attempts to address these questions in the context of the governance of human pluripotent stem cell research. In essence, he argues that the hybridization of law...

Biobanks have been heralded as essential tools for translating biomedical research into practice, driving precision medicine to improve pathways for global healthcare treatment and services. Many nations have established specific governance systems to facilitate research and to address the complex ethical, legal and social challenges that they pres...

Therapeutic misconception (TM) denotes the phenomenon in which research subjects conflate research purpose, protocols and procedures with clinical treatment. We examined the prevalence, contributory factors, clinical associations, impact, and collated solutions on TM within psychiatric research, and made suggestions going ahead. Literature search f...

There is a long history to the debate on the relationship between law and morality. To date, there is no clear consensus over basic questions like the extent that the substantive content of ‘law’ needs to be consistent with the moral requirements for it to be properly law. Whether there is a relationship at all depends very much on what one takes t...

This paper provides an evaluation of the discussion on the concept of vulnerability in research involving children, which took place at the 10th Global Summit of National Bioethics Committees—the primary international forum for members of national bioethics (or ethics) bodies to share their experiences and discuss emerging bioethical issues. Childr...

Vulnerability is a fundamental area of interest and debate in bioethics, and where children and young persons are concerned, it is typically invoked as justification for specific measures of protection. There is a degree of consensus that vulnerability is a complex that encapsulates overlapping moral interests and concerns arising from our needs as...

Promoting universal health coverage (UHC) has been an important part of Singapore’s overall development strategy, with a strong policy focus on the promotion, prevention and treatment of non-communicable diseases. The health care system is buttressed by a financing structure comprising the national medical savings scheme (Medisave), health insuranc...

This paper is a country case study for the Universal Health Coverage Collection, organized by WHO. Woan Shin Tan and colleagues illustrate progress towards UHC and its monitoring and evaluation in Singapore. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

Common infrastructures and platforms are required for international collaborations in large-scale human genomic research and policy development, such as the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and the 'ELSI 2.0' initiative. Such initiatives may require international harmonization of ethical and regulatory requirements. To enable this, however,...

This article discusses the establishment of a governance framework for biomedical research in Singapore. It focuses on the work of the Bioethics Advisory Committee (BAC), which has been instrumental in institutionalizing a governance framework, through the provision of recommendations to the government, and through the coordination of efforts among...

Making Difficult Decisions with Patients and Families: A Singapore Casebook is a unique web-based learning resource collaboratively created by the NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine with over 50 senior and junior Singapore healthcare practitioners, and academic consultants from The Hastings Center, New York, and...

Bioethics in Singapore may be construed as comprising three key systems: clinical, research, and academic. This chapter provides an analytical overview of each of these systems, beginning with a brief description of the healthcare infrastructure. In the past decade or so, systemic factors and a policy initiative have contributed to important change...

Covert treatment involving the administration of medicines without the knowledge of the patient is difficult to justify ethically and legally. In our case, Mrs. T does not have sufficient ethical or legal basis to do so. In addition, the psychiatrist should advise her against such an undertaking, particularly since Mr. T appears to have decision-ma...

The conduct of clinical trials in low-resource settings around the world by corporations (especially those from high-income countries) has drawn a number of critical questions. A number of these relate to the adequacy and effectiveness of research oversight (if available) and of informed consent. Just as important is the question of whether such tr...

Privacy is an unwieldy concept that has eluded an essentialised definition despite its centrality and importance in the body of bioethics. The compilation presented in this volume represents continuing discussions on the theme of privacy in the context of genetic information. It is intended to present a wide range of expert opinion in which the not...