Titel: Health, Culture and the Human Body: Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Genetics and Human Enhancement

Termin: 4.10.2018 bis 6.10.2018

Veranstaltungsort:
Istanbul, Türkei

Referenten: Keynote Speakers: Georg Marckmann (GER) *** Christine Hauskeller (UK) *** Dieter Birnbacher (GER)

Kurzbeschreibung: The frontlines of biomedical developments are expanding at an increasing speed. Novel technologies such as genome editing or repairing tissues in the human body or changing behaviour through drugs are promoted with great emphasis on how they might improve human life. At the same time, they raise profound concerns and fears. Since medical ethics began to professionalize in the 1970s, there has been demand on ethicists to increase their efforts to help society coming to terms with the new possibilities and risks of biotechnologies. For almost four decades, Beauchamp and Childress’s foundational Principles of Biomedical Ethics have provided a widely used framework for the analysis of questions arising in healthcare and biomedical research. Now in its 7th English edition (2012) and recently translated into Turkish by M. Kemal Temel (2017), the book has proposed ethical principles that have achieved high recognition status while still being subject to a lively debate, increasingly beyond the limits of Anglo-Saxon and general Western discourses. The cultural adaptability of any given set of ethical principles is controversial yet growing in importance in an interconnected world of health tourism and strategic choices of convenient research locations, especially by the industry.

This year’s conference will focus on the rapidly changing areas of genetic and genomic science and other forms of enhancement. We want to discuss principlist and other innovative ethical approaches to these biotechnologies, consider the historical formation of contemporary bioethics and examine the history of reading and re-writing human nature with the aim to restore, enhance, or innovate bodily and mental functions.

We particularly welcome interdisciplinary perspectives from areas such as history of medicine and ethics as well as human and social sciences in healthcare (medicine studies, epidemiology, social anthropology). Four earlier conferences under the theme of “Health, Culture and the Human Body” (Mainz 2010, Istanbul 2012 & 2014, Bremen 2016) established a dynamic platform for an international interdisciplinary discourse on medical interventions, organ transplantation as well as on palliative care and on the topic of migration and health. The “trademark” of our congress series is lively interdisciplinary discussion from ethical, historical, and epidemiological perspectives.

The conference organizers invite abstracts focused on, but not limited to the topics:

• Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Principlism)
• History of biomedical ethics
• Philosophical foundations of biomedical ethics
• Cultural (in)variance of biomedical principles
• Genetics/genomics and its ethical issues
• Inheritance and selection in human history
• Duty to know, right not to know? Ethics of genetic diagnosis and therapy
• “This CD is me” – reading and editing the human genome
• Human Enhancement
• History of interventions in the human body
• Human dignity, human nature and its ambiguity
• Creating a new humanity? Potential for changes in the human population

Abstracts (max. 250 words) of proposed conference papers should be submitted by 30 April 2018, to the attention of Ahmet Karakaya,
e-mail: ak624@exeter.ac.uk with “BETIM 2018 Conference Abstract” written in the subject line of the email.

Kontakt: Ahmet Karakaya
ak624@exeter.ac.uk