Has the President's Council on Bioethics missed the boat?
BMJ 2003; 327 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7415.629 (Published 11 September 2003) Cite this as: BMJ 2003;327:629All rapid responses
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My knowledge about the President's Council is mostly in relation to
their discussions on genetic enhancement in sport, so I would like to
focus on this as my response to your letter.
However, I would like first to make some general comments. I can
understand your frustration at the choice of focus for the Council, though
personally find it refreshing that such a body is willing to engage with
conceptually radical technologies. I am not clear whether you believe that
the Council is taking the focus away from the other more worthy issues you
discuss or whether you think there should be separate Councils with
separate remits. My impression is that there are other places where those
issues you mention are given attention. In contrast, there are nearly no
institutions where the kinds of issues being discussed by the Council are
also given importance.
For this reason, I welcome their choice of topic and firmly believe
that, by discussing some of these new biomedical technologies, we can
develop a clearer impression about why some of our current technologies
are so alarming.
In the specific case of sport, it is important to recognise the
limitations of technology and not create confusions about precisely what
is possible to achieve with the science we currently have. Still, within
sport there is a strong concern for not falling behind in relation to
enhancement technologies. For many years, anti-doping policy and testing
has struggled to keep up with the athletes. Moreover, policy in relation
to doping tends to have been reactive rather than proactive.
With imminent applications of genetics to equine sports, this is a
current issue. As well, there is a sense that if genetic modification
infiltrates such a familiar context as sport, then this presents serious
impications for how genetic modification becomes immersed into society.
Enough international organisations are taking this issue seriously now for
it to deserve consideration from the Council.
I do not say that the sporting issue or any other considered by the
Council is more important than those that you mention. I simply welcome
the discussion of these topics as part of an enriching discourse about
humans and the ends of technology. We need philosophical and conceptual
discussions about biomedical technologies as well as ethical and policy
discussions taking place at the highest governmental level.
Best wishes,
Andy Miah
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
Has the President's Council on Bioethics missed the boat?
Has the President’s Council on Bioethics missed the boat?
Potter who coined the word bioethics in 1970 intended it
to have a much broader meaning than currently used in the
narrow sense of ‘medical ethics’.1
“We are in great need of a land ethic, a wildlife ethic, a
population ethic, a consumption ethic, an urban ethic, an
international ethic, a geriatric ethic, and so on. All of
these problems call for actions that are based on values and
biological facts. All of them involve bioethics.....Mankind
is urgently in need of new wisdom that will provide “the
knowledge of how to use knowledge” for man’s survival and
for improvement in the quality of life. This concept of
wisdom as a guide for action--the knowledge of how to use
knowledge for the social good--might be called the “science
of survival” surely the prerequisite to improvement in the
quality of life.....A science of survival must be more than
science alone, and I therefore propose the term “bioethics”
in order to emphasize the two most important ingredients in
achieving the new wisdom that is so desperately needed:
biological knowledge and human values.....Man’s survival may
depend on ethics based on biological knowledge, hence
bioethics.”2
According to Potter’s definition the President’s council on
bioethics has certainly missed the boat. In his personal
view Turner3 considers that by ignoring the social
injustices of the U.S.A. as appropriate study and tasks for
bioethicists the President’s council has missed the boat. A
broader point of view, enlarged from Turner’s personal view
along the lines of Potter’s definition suggests that
bioethics should study all situations, which are matters of
life and death. This would include war and obesity. In
everyday practice physicians are sociologists, whether they
know and like it or not. Ethics is ethics and may not be
conveniently shunted off into a restricted study called
bioethics. Ethics has universal application or ethics is not
ethics!
John N Burry, retired dermatologist
PO Box 7177, Hutt St PO, Adelaide, South Australia 5000,
Australia
1. Jonsen AR. The Birth of Bioethics. Oxford Uni. Press:
New York, Oxford; 1998, 27.
2. Potter VR. 1970. Bioethics: The science of survival.
Perspect. Biol. Med. 14(1): 127-53. Quoted in From the
editor’s desk. Perspect. Biol. Med. Volume 45, number 1
(winter 2002), 156.
3. Turner L. Personal View. Has the President’s Council on
Bioethics missed the boat?
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests