The BAC was established by the Singapore Cabinet in December 2000. It was tasked to address the ethical, legal and social issues arising from biomedical sciences research in Singapore. The Bioethics Advisory Committee has been established to examine ethics, legal and social issues arising from research on human biology and behaviour and its application. BAC actively gathers information and views from the international and local community, and after careful deliberation, makes recommendations to the Government of Singapore’s Steering Committee on Life Sciences. As well as providing a rich resource of Consultation Papers and Articles (listed on their website) they also generate Reports on specific issues that include recommendations for the research community in Singapore. To date, there have been six reports prepared by the BAC. These are as follows:

Institutional Review Boards (IRB), also referred to as the Research Ethics Committee in some countries, reviews, approves and monitors ethical aspects of research projects that involve human subjects and human tissues/cells/data. Their main objective is to protect the rights and welfare of human research subjects in research activities. The links to local IRBs are:

NUS IRB (A*Star Institutes are supported by this IRB)
SingHealth IRB

Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) are responsible for ensuring the oversight and evaluation of animal care and use programmes of an institution, and is responsible for ensuring that the care and use of the animals for scientific purposes and all animal experimental procedures are in compliance with the National Advisory Committee For Laboratory Animal Research (NACLAR) Guidelines. Links to some of Singapore’s IACUCs are as follows:

International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) Ethics & Public Policy

- a research database concerning the socio-ethical and legal aspects of stem cell research