The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School was founded in 2005 through a generous gift from Joseph H. Flom and the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, to promote interdisciplinary analysis and legal scholarship in these fields. The Center is not an advocacy organization but is dedicated to the unbiased research of pressing questions facing health policymakers.
The future promises to raise new and fascinating issues that will make these interdisciplinary analyses all the more critical. Scientific advances are pushing the boundaries of current thinking on everything from what defines a human life to what constitutes an ethically tenable area of research, as well as raising complex issues about the appropriate role of intellectual property. Simultaneously, transformations in health care financing and business practices, changes in health law, and the growing realization that the environment has a direct link to human health have upset traditional professional and market paradigms.
The Petrie-Flom Center's founding vision is to promote scholarly inquiry that breaks away from existing disciplinary lines and brings the totality of these disciplinary methodologies under its compass to inform policy. To achieve this goal, the Center fosters a community of leading intellectuals, practitioners, and policymakers from various backgrounds and at all stages in their careers.