A bioethics primer: The growth of a complex field

Bioethics is a new, but increasingly important discipline. What makes a bioethicist, what do they decide and why should we care?

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. Nov. 26, 2001.

Philosophy and medicine have been studied since ancient Greece. Some 30 years ago, they merged with technology to form the field of bioethics.

Since then, bioethicists have been called upon to shed light on medicine's most difficult questions or vilified for using their untested field to justify terrible abuses. And interest is booming. Bioethics Web sites have sprung up, journals and books are being published, and bioethics has become an oft-repeated topic of scholarly conferences.

The field is even spawning media personalities. Jeffrey P. Kahn, PhD, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, comments for CNN.com. Glenn McGee, PhD, and Arthur Caplan, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia do the same for MSNBC.com.

American medicine may well be ill, said Leon Kass, MD, PhD, chair of President Bush's council of bioethics, but the field of medical ethics is "flourishing" as competing interests seek answers on the appropriate use of technology while others look to identify and curtail what they consider unethical or immoral behavior.

"This new interest reflected the growing belief that medical ethics are too important to leave to doctors alone," Dr. Kass said.

But even as bioethics goes mainstream, it is still a relatively unknown area -- misunderstood by both physicians and the public.

According to Drs. McGee and Caplan, medical ethics or bioethics is the "study of moral issues in the fields of medical treatment and research," and the terms are sometimes generally used "to describe ethical issues in the life sciences and the distribution of scarce medical resources." [...]