Biotechnology uses biological systems and living organisms to develop products. It has expanded rapidly since the 1970s with advances in genetic engineering. Biotechnology is applied in medicine, agriculture, industrial production, and environmental management. Bioethics applies ethics to issues in medicine and healthcare. It examines the relationship between doctors and patients, definitions of death, and debates surrounding transplants, cloning, abortion, and assisted suicide.

1. Biotechnology and bioethics
Biotechnology is technology that takes advantage of biological system, living organism to develop
and create different products. Brewing and baking bread can be considered examples of
biotechnology (use of yeast to produce the desired products) even if modern form of
biotechnology exploits more advanced modification of biological systems or organisms. The
development of genetic engeneering in the seventies caused a rapid development in this field
because of the ability to change the organisms’ genetic material (DNA).
Biotechnology covers many different fields:
 Medicine (development of new medicine and therapies).
 Agriculture (development of genetic modified plants, biofuels and biological treatment).
 Industrial biotechnology (production of chemicals, paper, textiles and food).
 Environment (used for solving and studying environmental process).
Bioethics is the application of ethics (a philosophical discipline that deals with the notion of good
and bad, right and wrong) to the field of medicine and health care.
Bioethics is multidisciplinary, since it covers philosophy, theology, history and law with medicine,
nursing, health policy. It is a recent discipline and the term was coined in 1971.
The issues studied in bioethics can be grouped into different categories:
 The relationship between doctor and patient (eg. Conflict between a doctor duty to
promote the health of his patient and the patient’s right to self-determination).
 When may a terminally ill patient considered dead.
 Transplant operation, abortion, birth control, cloning.
 Assisted suicide.