Question

Define and explain the term

Bioethics

Answer 1

1. Bioethics helps to study moral vision, decisions, and policies of human behaviour in relation to biological phenomena or events.
2. Ethics deals with ‘Life’ e.g. in vitro fertilization, sperm bank, gene therapy, cloning, gene manipulations, euthanasia, death, maintaining those who are in a comatose state, prenatal genetic selection, etc.
3. The era of biotechnology has brought a wide spectrum on new topics like cloning, transgenic, gene therapy, eugenics, rDNA technology, etc.
4. The use of all these has drawn a wide range of reactions in society.
5. Ethical aspects pertaining to the use of biotechnology seems to be more controversial and frightening.
6. These concerns are broadly summarized below: Use of animals causes great suffering to them; violation of integration of species caused due to transgenesis; transfer of human genes into animals and vice versa; indiscriminate use of biotechnology poses risk to the environment, health, and biodiversity.
7. The introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) has led to a wider debate on bioethical concerns affecting social, economic, and environmental spheres.
8. These include the effects on non-target organisms, insect resistance crops, gene flow, and the loss of diversity as well as the issue of interfering with nature.
9. Ethics in biotechnology also includes the general subject of what should and should not be done in using recombinant DNA techniques.