'The Global Health Bioethics Network: a programme to carry out ethics research and build ethics capacity across the Wellcome Trust's Major Overseas Programmes.'

Enormous global inequalities exist in health measures such as mortality, quality of life and disease despite increasing levels of overall wealth. In recent years, partly because of initiatives like the Wellcome Trust s Major Overseas Programmes (MOPs), there has been an unprecedented increase in the amount of research carried out on global health. Global health research, often bringing together multiple partners from sites in developing and developed countries, presents a range of important ethi cal and social issues not previously found in combination. These include issues relating to the sharing of data and biological samples between developing and developed countries, and to the question of what is to count as valid consent in the context of research occurring in multiple developing country settings. Identifying and addressing these important issues is essential for successful and appropriate science and for the achievement of the goals set out in the Wellcome Trust s Strategic Plan. The MOPs do not currently have sufficient capacity in ethics and community engagement to effectively engage with these important problems. Against this background, the aim of this proposal is to build ethics expertise and capacity across the MOPs by combining world-class research with a well- managed programme of networked, locally-driven capacity-building activities.