Biomedicine in Reverse

We're moving to this integration of biomedicine, information technology, wireless and, I would say, mobile now this era of digital medicine.

The Working Group on Space Technology in Health, Biomedicine and Education Applications and Human Resource Development addressed the issues in detail.

The successful completion of international space research programmes in the field of astrophysics (Interball), biomedicine (Bion) and space meteorology (Meteor 3)

On the final day of the Conference, participants had the opportunity to participate in working groups to discuss space technology applications in health, biomedicine and education and human resource development, and communications for development.

In that connection, my delegation hopes that the Mexican legislature will take the steps required to put in place the constitutional procedures necessary so that my country can finally accede to the Oviedo Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine and its Paris Protocol.

Still, the dilemma is obvious in pioneering fields like biomedicine, nanotechnology, and neurosciences. Research in these areas sometimes meets with vehement rejection, for example, on religious grounds with respect to stem cell research, or owing to fear with respect to the possibility of altering human identity.

Trade in humans and their bodies is not a new phenomenon, but today s businesses are historically unique, because they require advanced biomedicine, as well as ideas and values that enhance the trade in organs. Western medicine starts from the view that human illness and death are failures to be combated.

In biomedicine, a series of legal cases have generated powerful momentum toward the transfer of rights over the body and its component parts from the individual owner to corporations and research institutions. So the body has entered the market, becoming capital, just as land did, though not everyone benefits, any more than the dispossessed commoners grew wealthy during the agricultural enclosures.

In my view, what is needed is reform of the very culture of contemporary biomedicine. We must train students and practitioners in critical self reflection on that which limits their care giving in strategies and techniques aimed at opening a space for the moral acts of care giving and in the most concrete and practical acts of assistance, so that they never forget what care giving actually means.

In addition to national legislation, international treaties like the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (which the UK has not signed) specifically prohibit human germline genetic modification. The easy explanation for this prohibition would be moral aversion to eugenics, the pseudoscience of improving a population s genetic composition, which was popular in the West in the first half of the twentieth century, before being discredited by the example of the Nazis.