BIOETHICS

the discipline dealing with the ethical implications of both biological research and the applications of that research, especially in medicine. The first bioethics study institute, the Hastings Center, was established in June 1969 and is now located in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., U.S. In 1971 Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., established The Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics, which created a Center for Bioethics and sponsored the publication of the first Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 4 vol. (1978). By the 1990s there were well over a hundred bioethics organizations worldwide. The rise of bioethics is traceable to several events. First, although ethical issues have been raised in medicine and biology since ancient times (witness, for instance, the Hippocratic oath), the large-scale introduction of biomedical and other technologies in the second half of the 20th century has intensified old problems and added new onessuch as issues over the definition of death and the withdrawal of life-sustaining medical treatment, prenatal diagnosis and abortion, the storage of frozen human embryos, the use of humans, animals, or fetal tissue for scientific research, the screening of persons for the AIDS virus or other infections, the disposition of toxic wastes, the expansion of genetic engineering, and the allocation of scarce health resources. Second, awareness of bioethics and other moral issues has been dramatically raised; professionals and students now routinely raise ethical questions. In the course of such questioning, bioethics has affected philosophy, pushing it to pay more attention to practical problems. Finally, the growth of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work in academic institutions has facilitated dealing concurrently with biological research and with moral and social issues of human behaviour.