INTRODUCTION
Biomedical ethics are the moral and ethical issues associated with advances in the biological sciences and biomedical engineering. It is not just science and engineering that undergo changes, but also society. Societal changes also affect morals and ethics. Therefore, it is important to understand the changes—scientific, engineering, and societal—that contribute to our evaluation of what the ethical approach to research is.
Few things throughout history have changed society as much as The Fall. Because of the chaos inherent to The Fall, we are still rebuilding our history of not just what we lost but, more importantly, what we were able to save and rebuild. To those of you born after, it is hard to understand how easy and readily accessible individual and mass communication was to even the poorest throughout the world. We lived in an unparalleled age of information exchange.
Even the remnants of this communication ability that survived the Fall have allowed historians a trove of information ranging from official government communications to untold thousands of personal journals. To this day we continue to integrate these sources of information together to provide a record of, arguably, the largest event in human history in greater detail—and from more points of view—than any other event in history. This is both a boon, and a curse, thanks to the reputed unreliability of some narrators.
We will begin this class with a survey of the major historical events that contributed to pre-Fall biomedical ethics, and what the ethical positions were prior to the Fall. We will then move on to the history of biomedical research during and following the Fall and how that research was viewed under pre-Fall ethical positions, and how new ethical standards have evolved since then.
It is important that we look beyond mere survival, toward ways to grow and flourish. We must observe and record, with a dispassionate eye, the various datapoints that allowed for society to rebuild. As scientists, part of the way we contribute to this is not just by being effective in our research, but by being ethical in how we approach that research. In this way we help to move past simply persisting, with the records that show how average people rose above expectations and contributed to society rebuilding, and thriving as our guide.
Now, if you look at the timeline on your syllabus you will see that the first lecture will cover . . .
—Beginning of the first lecture in the course
“Grad 725—Research Methods for the Infected”
by Dr. Tedd Roberts, University of the South, 2047