A case study of the Canadian public consultation on xenotransplantation.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
Description: This thesis is a case study of the Health Canada-commissioned public consultation on xenotransplantation that took place from August 2000 to February 2002. Health Canada funded the Canadian Public Health Association to form a Public Advisory Group, who were commissioned to consult with Canadians about whether or not Health Canada should proceed with clinical trials of xenotransplantation. This public consultation was the first government-commissioned consultation that used a deliberative method of public consultation. Using two different models of the public understanding of science as the underlying theory, this case study examines how the Public Advisory Group's epistemological commitments framed their understandings of what they were doing when they were consulting the public. The major finding of the study is that in addition to two models of the public understanding of science, there were also two different and incompatible conceptualizations of public consultation at work in this case. These were a scientific conceptualization of public consultation and a deliberative conceptualization of public consultation. This led to inconsistencies between the stated aims of the public consultation and how these aims were carried out by the PAG. Moreover, I found that there were important normative implications for public consultation stemming from these different conceptualizations of public consultation. This study is located in the emerging field of critical bioethics in which social science research is thought to contribute something that is lacking in purely philosophical approaches to ethics. Thus, this research makes an important contribution to critical bioethics by showing that an empirical, case study method can be used to identify normative issues in public consultation.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: B, page: 3094.