Bioetica, la aproape patru decenii de la lansarea conceptului

Abstract

If the history of medical ethics is confronted with early medical practice, bioethics, branch of the ethics, is a much younger science, its birth year being 1971, when the American medical doctor Van Renssalaer Potter published the paper "Bioethics: Bridge to the Future". The progresses of research in biology and medicine were accompanied by legitimate concerns relating to possible slippages, flaws of control and risks of human rights and dignity disregarding; especially the biotechnologies have revolutionized molecular biology, genetics, but have also fetched the risk of genetic manipulation, eugenics, reproductive medicine (in vitro fertilization, reproductive human cloning, possibility of choice and determination of the future foetus gender), predictive medicine (with possible discriminations based on genetic criteria in employment, insurances), tissues and organs transplantation (with the risk of illicit trafficking and marketing), pharmaceutical industry progresses, and the increasingly strong orientation towards a market and profit economy, in detriment of the moral model, with increasingly frequent effects of launching insufficiently tested products, with possible important side effects, into the market, experiments on humans and animals, dilemmas in taking decisions in terminal states (euthanasia and assisted medical suicide), environment artificiality, destruction of the biodiversity, biosphere damage, and last but not least, genetically modified organisms penetrating the food production practice. Bioethics is a trans-disciplinary field with the objective of examining all the aspects of the life and health at the impact with the results of the biomedical research and biotechnology and their application, reviewed in the light of moral values and principles. In the meantime, the bioethics has evolved, and national and organisms international emerged (bioethical committees); the United Nations, UNESCO, WHO, the EU have developed specific monitoring and control tools. The milestones of this evolution and development are presented broadly in the paper.