This project will investigate the relationship between Egypt's medical community and Islamic legal scholarship with respect to new biomedical technologies and the ways in which this relationship is mediated by state legislation and encountered by patients. The study will examine how various institutions (medical, religious, state legislative) interact with one another in the management of bioethics and how patients' approach to ethical concerns are affected by and affect this set of institutions. Moreover, this study will examine patients' own understandings of bioethical debates and determine where they fit into this institutional complex. The project will rely on ethnographic analysis of medical institutions and textual analyses (Islamic, state legislative, media, and biomedical) of contemporary bioethical debates in Egypt. I plan to be affiliated with Cairo University Faculty of Medicine (Kasr el Aini Teaching Hospital) during the research phase.