The Genethics Club was established in 2001, to provide a social space in which anyone working in clinical genetics in the United Kingdom, including nurses, counsellors, doctors, laboratory staff, and medical researchers, could present and discuss ethical issues arising in their practice www.genethicsclub.org. The Genethics Club is organised by Tara Clancy, Angus Clarke, Anneke Lucassen and Michael Parker. The clinical model for this intervention was the Dysmorphology Club, a pre-existing regular national forum for the presentation and discussion of difficult clinical cases by members of different Regional Genetics Services. Since its inception, the Genethics Club has met fifteen times. It has been popular with health professionals and researchers, and attended on average by 45 people, involving several hundred different attendees overall, and including, on a regular basis, members of every clinical genetics service and NHS laboratory in the country. Meetings of the Genethics Club involve presentations by those working in genetics of ‘cases’ that they consider to present ethical issues and to be problematic, either in themselves or in relation to their implications for practice more widely. These case presentations have tended to be rich and have been followed by open discussion, facilitated by an ‘ethicist’ (Mike Parker). Often, the discussions open up and generate many other ethical issues to those initially presented. Since it began, the Genethics Club has seen approximately one hundred and fifty case presentations.

My role in the Genethics Club has been multi-faceted. Perhaps most importantly, I have been responsible for the continued maintenance of the Genethics Club as a welcoming social space for the enactment of ethics as an object of concern across multiple genetics practices in a number of different locations. I have organised the space to allow sufficient time for the presentation of the cases. I have facilitated the subsequent discussion, ensuring that all who want to speak have a chance to do so. I have tried to ensure that marginal voices and perspectives are heard and taken seriously. I have used my knowledge of the literature, my experience of previous Genethics Club meetings, and my experience of work in a genetics unit, to introduce issues and contrasting practices I think have been overlooked. I have adopted a methodologically critical stance to established practices. At the same time, I have kept fieldnotes both of the cases and of subsequent discussions, and have attempted to map and track the enactment of ethics as an object of concern both over the course of a meeting, and over the life of the Genethics Club, bearing in mind that my role is deeply implicated in the enactment of ethics in this setting.

I am currently in the process of writing up the Genethics Club as an ethnography of ethics in clinical genetics. The methodology adopted and some preliminary analysis is to be published as Parker, M. Ethnography/Ethics (2007) Social Science and Medicine (forthcoming)