Reviewing fundamental aspects of bioethics and outlining the work of the Bioethics Program of the Pan American Health Organization, this paper draws attention to the work of a forgotten pioneer- Fritz Jahr- who coined the term bioethics in 1927 and anticipated many of the arguments and discussions now current in biological research involving animals.

Is the theory that grounds H. Tristram Engelhardt's The Foundations of Bioethics and the practices it suggests compatible with the theory and practices found in feminist approaches to bioethics? Is The Foundations ofBioethics a work that teaches "that the subordination of women is morally wrong and that the moral experience of women is as worthy of respect as that of men?"' Or is it instead a w...

Bioethics has now become a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of scholarly investigation which has in the past decades migrated from bedside consultations to public policy debates and wider cultural and social consultations that privilege all discourse about everyday life issues. It has made exponential progress in addressing moral issues in science, technology and medicine in the world. In spi...

The South Korean government passed the Bioethics and Biosafety Act, known henceforth as the Bioethics Act,in 2003 and it took effect in 2005. South Korea?s Ministry of Health and Welfare proposed the law to the South Korean National Assembly to allow the progress of biotechnology and life sciences research in South Korea while protecting human research subjects with practices such as informed c...

This article charts the history of bioethics in Britain through the work of the academic lawyer Ian Kennedy. From the late 1970s, Kennedy claimed that external oversight, which he termed ‘bioethics’, was needed to make medicine accountable to patients and the public. I believe these arguments provide a window onto the historical factors that generated the demand for bioethics, and help us deter...

The South Korean government passed the Bioethics and Biosafety Act, known henceforth as the Bioethics Act,in 2003 and it took effect in 2005. South Korea?s Ministry of Health and Welfare proposed the law to the South Korean National Assembly to allow the progress of biotechnology and life sciences research in South Korea while protecting human research subjects with practices such as informed c...

The concept of global, Asian and Chinese bioethics are discussed in this paper and the difficulty in applying universal bioethics within different cultures and countries is addressed. The traditional beliefs and values in China are described with particular reference to medicine, and the implications for bioethics and research ethics within the country are considered.

The anthology, Feminist Bioethics, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, examines how feminist bioethics theoretically and methodologically challenges mainstream bioethics, and whether these approaches are useful for exploring difference in other contexts. It offers critical conceptual analyses of “autonomy”, “universality”, and “trust”, and covers top...

This article details the relationship between history and bioethics. I argue that historians' reluctance to engage with bioethics rests on a misreading of the field as solely reducible to applied ethics, and overlooks previous enthusiasm for historical perspectives. I claim that seeing bioethics as its practitioners see it - as an interdisciplinary meeting ground - should encourage historians t...