In February 2004, South Korean researchers became the first in the world
to successfully harvest stem cells and establish a stem cell line from a
cloned human embryo. This is just one of eight possible policy options
concerning human embryonic stem cell research. In practice, every kind
of stem cell research can be done in one country or another. This paper
evaluates the eight policy options concerning human embryonic stem cell
research in light of the arguments and decisions behind them.
Psychiatry is distinguished from other fields of medical expertise and bears a particular kind of responsibility, namely the treatment of persons incapable of informed consent per se. The History of psychiatry shows that much too often inhuman abuse was happening in psychiatric facilities. An ethics of psychiatry therefore requires a reliable and stable foundation for values that allow justifying normative claims embracing both characteristics. Such a basic foundation already exists in form of the pluralistic and international recognition of human dignity. We argue that human dignity does and has to go beyond "respect for autonomy" and by that it can function as highest authority on questions concerning value judgments on critical cases in psychiatric bioethics.
In the Helsinki Declaration, the World Medical Association lay down basic ethical norms for medical research on humans: the commitment to ensure informed consent of patients, to particularly safeguard vulnerable persons, to use a risk-benefit evaluation that meets human needs and a commitment to adhere to legal regulations and scientific standards. These norms function here as a basic ethical framework as they do not depend on certain ethical systems, cultural or ideological beliefs. Therefore, they offer the chance of finding consensus. The actual challenge here is not to justify once more how useful those norms are that are strongly tied to the concept of human dignity but to apply them to cases of ethical conflicts and thereby increase our understanding of them. In this paper the position of the Bioethics Convention will be defended, that research undertaken with vulnerable subjects is ethically permissible even if the benefits serve others, yet only if the involved risks are minimal. The aim is to prevent vulnerable persons from becoming therapeutic orphans.
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