Exploring Bioethics - NIH Office of Science Education - National ...

You may wish to introduce some of the topics included in thissupplement, especially the ones that you will be teaching later.See theIntroductionMore background on ethics canbe found on page 3 of theIntroduction.4. Share with students that bioethics offers ways to think about,analyze, and make decisions about difficult ethical questionsrelated to biology and its applications.5. Provide the following working definition of ethics by stating it,writing it on the board or a transparency, or distributing it tostudents.Ethics seeks to determine what a person should do, or the best courseof action, and provides reasons why. It also helps people decide howto behave and treat one another, and what kinds of communities wouldbe good to live in.6. Add that bioethics is the application of ethics to the field of biology.Ethics addresses questions such as, Which actions should be permitted?and Which action is best? by providing arguments and reasons.Bioethics addresses ethical questions that arise with respect to biologicaladvances, such as, Should running with an artificial limb be permittedin the Olympics?7. Describe a few other bioethical issues briefly, noting that studentswill need to face issues that their parents and teachers never had to.• New inventions, medicines, and biomedical procedures are in thenews daily. For example, what if a new genetic test was available fora fatal disease that you knew ran in your family? Should you havethe test?• People who used to die due to organ failure can now continue livingif they receive an organ transplant. But the number of availableorgans is limited. Who should receive an organ transplant? Shouldthe organ go to someone who is sickest or someone who is mostlikely to live the longest if they receive it?8. Introduce the idea of enhancement as a bioethical issue. Tellstudents that they will be looking at some examples where peopleused technology to change their bodies.9. Read this short case about enhancement and alertness aloud:A group of college students is staying up late together to study for exams.Several of them have been drinking coffee all day and are wide awake, althoughfeeling jittery. One of the students, Lisa, mentions that she has recently startedtaking a prescription medication that helps her stay awake because of a medicalcondition. Lisa had previously been a heavy coffee drinker, consuming four ormore cups of coffee a day in her struggle to stay awake. Since starting on the1-8 Exploring Bioethics