Cultural Responses to the Taming of Nature

Abstract

"Medical ethics has a history of more than 1000 years, but it is a history, both in Asia and Euro-America, which has until very recently been dominated by commentary produced from within the medical profession itself. David Rothman, who has traced the history of bioethics in North America, shows how it is in connection with human experimentation, from the late 1960's on, that a new group of commentators -- lawyers, philosophers, and legislators, became actively engaged with the issue of what was being done to human subjects in the name of scientific research (Rothman:1991). Since that time the majority of bioethical concerns have been about the development and application of new biomedical technologies, in particular those used in connection with pregnancy and birth and dying and death."