Medical Ethics
Research into Ethics and the Biomedical Sciences
The Division of Medical Ethics is concerned with the many ethical issues surrounding advances in the fields such as genetics, reproduction, stem cell research, and vaccinations. Among the issues that deserve exploration are how to design ethical studies and recruit appropriate human subjects for testing new technologies, how and how much to regulate scientific research, and how to put into practice new medical technologies in a way that respects individual rights and social justice.
Much of the work of Inmaculada de Melo-Martín, Ph.D., M.S., focuses on these issues. Because of training in philosophy and molecular biology, she is especially interested in research involving reproduction, including in vitro fertilization; and genetics, including genetic testing and gene transfer. She has published widely on these topics, both in journals and in several books. Her most recent book, Taking Biology Seriously: What Biology Can and Cannot Tell Us About Moral and Public Policy Issues, offers an account of the often misguided discussions that take place about human biology and the consequences for ethics and public policy. It explores mistaken beliefs about the role of genes in human life held by both proponents and critics of behavioral genetics, reproductive cloning, and genetic testing, and calls attention to the social context in which both the science and our ethical precepts and public policies play a role.
To support her efforts, Dr. de Melo-Martín was recently awarded a grant from from the National Science Foundation for her two-year project, “Biology and Ethics: Evaluating the Claim that Biotechnologies Pose a Threat to Human Dignity.” This study will examine the ways in which the concept of human dignity is used in current debates about biotechnologies such as human genetic enhancement, the creation of human-nonhuman chimeras, and embryonic stem cell research. It will provide the first systematic assessment of what several influential scholars and recent national and international science policy documents mean when they say that these technologies threaten human dignity. Thus, the research can play a role in improving dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and between the sciences and society.
