Human experimentation and the crisis of self-regulation in biomedicine

Abstract

Biomedical experimentation in human beings is a field in which, initially, the fate of equitable regulation of scientific medical activity was played out. The crisis in this field will in turn be the principal condition for the emergence of a contemporary bioethics. Bioethics is the outcome and the expression of that crisis: it must resist attempts to reduce it either to a simple code of medical ethics, or to a system of applied moral theology.