ABSTRACT
Emerging biotechnologies offer unprecedented opportunities to bypass individual consent. Their birth is often accompanied by immense promise of multitudes of remarkable benefits so that to be sceptical or even cautious about them seems churlish or small-minded. They facilitate innovative treatments but their essence precedes their applications and these often vary widely. While some of them will be innocent and welcomed, others overtake us unawares and constitute threats to our health and well-being which we would not have chosen to accept had we been able to predict their occurrence or even been aware of their possibility. In addition they often offer great promise to the public interest at the expense of the interest of the individual. In the recent past we have seen two major developments of this kind in in vitro fertilisation and DNA genetic technology. Their development has been so rapid that ethical reflection on their introduction and application has lagged behind the technical advances. As a result much of that reflection has been reactive. In this chapter we shall examine the emerging nanotechnologies. They follow hard on the heels of the others but are as yet in relative infancy. Thus a case might be made for endeavouring to anticipate the ethical challenges of these technologies before they are upon us.
