In June 1989, La Direction de la Sante physique (ministere de la Sante et des Services sociaux) (MSSS) undertook a major research project focusing on ethics committees in Quebec, in cooperation with Laval University's Groupe de recherche en Ethique Medicale (GREM). Initially, three major objectives were set out: to prepare a faithful overview of ethics committees in Quebec; to inform all those involved of the available resources, and to collect the data required to eventually carry out in-depth research on ethics committees. A number of government documents refer to the existence of ethics committees, whether to request their cooperation or to entrust mandates to them; moreover, the Law Reform Commission of Canada recently published a document that proposed establishing a Canadian Advisory Council on Biomedical Ethics. The MSSS, therefore, had to study the situation in Quebec with regard to ethics committees in order to be in a position to clarify its position in future discussions. This overview is the outcome of the first stage of this research project. Essentially, it represents the first of three main sections of a single document. It [1] presents general data on ethics committees, [2] contains a description of each committee by socio-sanitary region and type of committee, and in section three it deals with the principal resources available in bioethics in Quebec, Canada, and throughout the world.