Bioethics & Genetics

Advances in medicine and biology have made possible great advances for future medical procedures and for entirely new procedures such as genetic splicing to create new forms of life. These new procedures bring with them great responsibility and require that experimentation and development in biology be conducted following ethical precepts. The issues thus raised are not simple and are not easily answered, making it all the more vital that critical thinking be developed and applied to issues of bioethics. In short, bioethics has developed as a wide-ranging field because there is a need for an ethical framework for experimentation on drugs and medical procedures using human beings or because science can now do things which were once left only to human biology, including everything from genetic manipulation to cloning. Every step forward raises concerns that the next step might go in the wrong direction, and bioethics is a method for deciding which step to take and which step to avoid.

We must apply critical thinking even to the determination of what underlying ethical structure to apply to these issues. Some believe there is a natural law that must be followed in making these decisions and that we must be true to nature in making our ethical decisions. Others see a different imperative at work:

There is nothing in terms of natural laws or patterns that we should emulate. Our morality is not concerned with obeying laws of nature. Instead it is concerned with facing fac

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or the integrity of the research itself. The most notorious instance in this century was probably that of the medical experiments conducted on prisoners by doctors and scientists of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany during World War II. This research is recalled from time by some who feel that in spite of the way the data was acquired, the information itself might be of value to medical science, while still others find that the data is tainted scientifically as well as ethically and should not see the light of day. The issue of the ethics and validity of medical testing without consent has been raised most recently in terms of radiation experiments conducted by the U.S. government without the knowledge of the test subjects in the 1950s. A variety of medical experiments were conducted on prisoners in the death camps of the Nazis during World War II. Clearly, it is not a big step from the presumption that an entire class of people is inferior and can be exterminated to the idea that these same people can serve as guinea pigs in medical experiments, for in both cases there is an assumption of superiority on the part of the dominant force and a belief that the subjected peoples are less than human. Robert Jay Lifton offers an in

Category: Science - B