NORTH COUNTY -- Local biomedical scientists and companies are invited to take part in a San Diego-based institute now forming to examine the issues arising when science meets up with ethical issues.

Michael Kalichman, director of UC San Diego's Research Ethics Program, made the pitch Wednesday at a meeting of Biocom, San Diego's trade association for life science companies. The meeting was held at the La Jolla Marriott. UCSD is a major sponsor of the institute, the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology.

The biomedical industry is constantly roiled by ethical debates over issues such as human cloning, embryonic stem cell research and informed consent for risky clinical trials. There are a number of biomedical ethics centers across the country addressing these issues, but none in San Diego County, which has the third-largest cluster of biotech companies in the nation.

Kalichman said the Center for Ethics will not be a purely academic institution. Instead, it will be rooted in the community, reaching out not only to local scientists, but also clergy, the legal profession, government officials and other interested groups.

The ethics center's other major sponsors are the University of San Diego and the Burnham Institute, a scientific research organization in La Jolla. The ethics center as of yet has no office of its own, but it has received charitable grants to help it organize. Eventually, the center will be incorporated as a nonprofit organization, Kalichman said.

"We intend to do this for the San Diego region, but do it in a way that hopefully will have a national impact," Kalichman said in an interview after the Biocom meeting.

Kalichman said he and other members of the ethics center are now holding a series of community meetings to help determine how the center should operate and what issues it should address. It has a Web site still in development at ethicscenter.us.

The ethics center could be "a very important advantage to the overall biotech community," said David Hale, chief executive officer of CancerVax, a Carlsbad-based company developing vaccines to treat cancer.

"As biotechnology companies continue to make new discoveries that advance the knowledge of disease processes, having an institute like that will give us the opportunity to participate in the ethical debate that may arise with some of the new discoveries," Hale said.

The Burnham Institute strongly supports the ethics center because it is delving deep into areas such as stem cell research, where dealing with ethical issues is imperative, said Nancy Beddingfield, a spokeswoman for the institute.

Contact staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at (760) 739-6641 or bfikes@nctimes.com.