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"How could the ethical management of health data in the medical field inform police use of DNA?"
Various events paved the way for the production of ethical norms regulating biomedical practices, from the Nuremberg Code (1947)—produced by the international trial of Nazi regime leaders and collaborators—and the Declaration of Helsinki by the World Medical Association (1964) to the invention of the term “bioethics” by American biologist Van Rensselaer Potter. The ethics of biomedicine has given rise to various controversies—particularly in the fields of newborn screening, prenatal screening, and cloning—resulting in the institutionalization of ethical questions in the biomedical world of genetics. In 1994, France passed legislation (commonly known as the “bioethics laws”) to regulate medical practices in genetics. The medical community has also organized itself in order to manage ethical issues relating to its decisions, with a view to handling “practices with many strong uncertainties” and enabling clinical judgments and decisions to be made not by individual practitioners but rather by multidisciplinary groups drawing on different modes of judgment and forms of expertise. Thus, the biomedical approach to genetics has been characterized by various debates and the existence of public controversies. (Full article...)
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