Pregledni rad
Genetic engineering - ethical challenges of high technology
Helmut Renöckl
Sažetak
As a part of our reality, genetic engineering presents a new, qualitative step in the long history of conscious human interventiois in the biological structure. Genetic engineering recently includes a direct intervention in genes as life determiners and inherited information, which has contributed to hasty life rhythm, to efficiency and achievements of human interventions and change in life processes. However, this sudden progress in the fields of science and technology has imposed the necessity for ethical reflection on justification of certain interventions in human life itself. Therefore, telling apart the rejection of any kind of intervention in life processes, on one hand, and the unconditional approval of genetic engineering in the other, the author wishes to point to the necessity of distinction between interventions of a diagnostic nature and those, which interfere with the very creation and natur of human life. Genetic engineering provides potential for great risks and possibility of manipulation, and at the same time, for the improvement and pain relief. It is very important to recognize different levels of responsibility: personal level, the level of social rules and structures, and international level. Ethic at judgement would only permit interventions of a therapeutic nature in which risks are limited to an
individual patient, while all the efforts of genetic engineering to alter human genome must be refused as eclatant impertinence and an act against basic human dignity.
Ključne riječi
Biotechnology; genetic engineering; bioethics; life; health; genetically modified food; medical diagnostics; inherited diseases; life-culture
Hrčak ID:
40237
URI
Datum izdavanja:
27.5.2002.
Posjeta: 1.677 *