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The Human Genome Project and the related research and development activities have raised heated discussions around some very basic ethical and social issues. A much debated concern is that of justice in human genetic research and in possible applications, especially pertaining to questions of just benefit-sharing - who and based on what sort of argumentation has the right to require benefits arising from research and discoveries, and what can even be considered as benefits? In what follows I will be examining and clarifying the notion of benefit-sharing by focusing on its justifications. I will argue for certain qualifications and limitations in using this concept in specific and universal contexts. The idea of benefit-sharing Social justice has been first and foremost discussed as distributive justice or the sharing of benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Some objects of distribution (goods, services, duties) aspire to universal status, some are particular to a specific cultural, geographic, religious or other context, ultimately leaving the society or community handling the distribution as the measure by which certain goods become valued. It has generally been agreed that some goods or benefits like food and shelter are valued in all societies but the list is almost endless, including rights and liberties, money and commodities, jobs and opportunities, medical care, education, honours and prizes, personal security, special privileges, resources and so on. How does research in human genetics link up with the discussions of benefit-sharing and justice? It has been suggested that the potential harm of the genetic revolution may rather lie in the ability of technology to distribute the available resources even more unequally than is currently the case, and in that way enforce and strengthen the existing disparities and inequity.1 On the other hand it is suggested that genetics might have enormous potential in levelling the existing inequalities and providing for a more just and equitable existence. Few would dispute that the impact the application of genetics might have in specific societies, as well as in a global context, owes much to the way its fruits, as well as its burdens, will be distributed. Hence the rise of the benefit-sharing concept, as most would agree that the potential for both greater good and greater harm is there. There are also views that dispute the application of a benefit-sharing framework within genetics, and these are mostly related to a perception that discussions of benefit-sharing actually legitimate the attempts to commercialize and profit from (human) genome. This approach could be based on an understanding that genetic research is part of a larger humanistic project of medicine, where financial or other incentives should recede before important values like human health and quality of life. If human genetic research is about locating genes, understanding their functions and

Benefit-sharing: an inquiry regarding the meaning and limits of the concept in human genetic research