Bioethics

Ethics, in general, deals with matters of socially acceptable moral duty, conduct and judgement -- it helps regulate a community's behaviour according to a shared set of standards, though the specific concepts differ by culture and tradition, and shift over time as science and technology reshape people's values. Bioethics is the study of moral vision, decisions and policy around human behaviour in relation to biological phenomena or events -- it covers issues such as in-vitro fertilisation, sperm banks, gene therapy, cloning, gene manipulation, euthanasia, death, care of patients in a comatose state, and prenatal genetic selection.

The era of biotechnology has brought a wide range of new, often controversial topics into this space -- cloning, transgenesis, gene therapy, eugenics, rDNA technology -- and society's reactions to them vary with each individual's own perception and moral stance. The concerns raised are broadly these: the suffering caused to animals used in biotechnology research; the violation of a species' integrity caused by transgenesis (transferring human genes into animals, and animal genes into humans, in either direction); and the risk that indiscriminate use of biotechnology poses to the environment, to human health, and to biodiversity. …