Founded at Harvard Law School in 2005, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics exists to respond to the need for leading legal scholarship in these fields, promote interdisciplinary analysis of the legal issues affecting health care, biotechnology and bioethics, and produce scholarship that offers creative and promising solutions to some of the most vexing problems at the intersection of health, law and ethics.
The Petrie-Flom Center promotes scholarly inquiry that breaks away from existing disciplinary lines and brings the totality of multiple methodologies under its compass. To achieve this goal, the Center fosters the growth of a community of leading intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds and at all stages in their careers. The Center is not an advocacy agency, but is dedicated to the non-partisan promotion of important new ideas and empirical findings.
The Center hosts academic fellows, offers a student internship program, and organizes several events each year. It hosts a collaborative blog, and is now developing projects that will involve substantial collaboration with colleagues at the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, Government, and others. The Center is also a partner, with Stanford and Duke, in the creation and publication of a new peer-reviewed academic journal, the Journal of Law and Biosciences.