Republished by the LSU Medical Reseach Law Project

DR. SHAPIRO: Colleagues, I’d like to call the meeting to order. First of all, welcome. I hope the members of the Commission had a good and productive summer. As you can see from the materials in the book, we’ve been busy trying to generate reports and analyses for your review and discussion. We could look briefly at our agenda before I turn it over to Eric—I think it’s pretty clear that all of this morning we’ll be dealing with the human biological materials report. Tom will be joining us shortly; in the meantime, Eric and Kathi will lead us through the draft that we have, or at least focus us on some of the issues that we have to discuss and decisions that we have to make. And then we’ll turn this afternoon to the comprehensive human subjects projects, and then tomorrow—virtually the entire day—to deal with our report on human subjects.

That, of course, is in its most complete form of the reports that we have and we’ll very interested in hearing the discussion on that tomorrow. I want to apologize in advance to Commission members that I’ll have to leave early tomorrow afternoon, but Jim will be here to be sure that we get through that report on time. If there are any special scheduling difficulties members of the Commission have, just let us know during the break and we can...just make sure that we know about them. And, again, any comments that you might have so we can make them part of our ongoing discussion. So let me now just turn to Eric for the Executive Director’s report. Eric.