Informed consent and biobanks

Informed consent can serve many purposes - disclosing risk, honoring the individual, and addressing lack of trust. Consent documents in many instances have become enormously complex, due in part to intricate, conflicting, and changing regulatory schemes, which are described herein, and institutional fear of penalties. The future role of informed consent actually turns on many other factors' including the protection actually provided to information and materials, the public's trust in research, the role of oversight bodies, some of which may need to be created, the resolution of intellectual property issues, and most important, what we will choose to do about disclosing individual research findings.