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( Bioethics)
Bioethics is the philosophical study of the ethical controversies brought about by advances in biology and medicine. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, philosophy, and theology. The term Bioethics (Greek bios, life; ethos, behavior) was coined in 1927 by Fritz Jahr, who "anticipated many of the arguments and discussions now current in biological research involving animals" in an article about the "bioethical imperative," as he called it, regarding the scientific use of animals and plants.[1][2] In 1970, the American biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter also used the term with a broader meaning including solidarity towards the biosphere, thus generating a "global ethics," a discipline representing a link between biology, ecology, medicine and human values in order to attain the survival of both human beings and other animal species.[3][4] Although bioethical issues have been debated since ancient times, and public attention briefly focused on the role of human subjects in biomedical experiments following the revelation of Nazi experiments conducted during World War II, the modern field of bioethics first emerged as an academic discipline in Anglophone societies in the 1960s. Technological advances in such diverse areas as organ transplantation and end-of-life care, including the development of kidney dialysis and respirators, posed novel questions regarding when and how care might be withdrawn. Furthermore, as philosophy in Britain and elsewhere moved away from the influences of logical positivism and emotivism, the development of theories of ethics and their application to practical problems gained in interest. These questions were often discussed by philosophers and religious scholars; in England, there were notable contributions from GEM Anscombe and RM Hare. By the 1970s, bioethical think tanks and academic bioethics programs had emerged. Among the earliest such institutions were the Hastings Center (originally known as The Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences), founded in 1969 by philosopher Daniel Callahan and psychiatrist Willard Gaylin, and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, established at Georgetown University in 1971. The publication of Principles of Biomedical Ethics by James F. Childress and Tom Beauchamp—the first American textbook of bioethics—marked a transformative moment in the discipline. During the subsequent three decades, bioethical issues gained widespread attention through the court cases surrounding the deaths of Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan and Terri Schiavo. The field developed its own cadre of widely-known advocates, such as Al Jonsen at the University of Washington, John Fletcher at the University of Virginia, Jacob M. Appel at Brown University, Ruth Faden at Johns Hopkins University, and Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1995, President Bill Clinton established the President's Council on Bioethics, a sign that the field had finally reached an unprecedented level of maturity and acceptance in the United States of America. President George W. Bush also relied upon a Council on Bioethics in rendering decisions in areas such as the public funding of embryonic stem-cell research.
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