ABSTRACT
Bearing in mind the historical background of the Freiburg Project, it may be appropriate to say a few words about ethical committees. There are some private ethical committees which exist simply because a group of people have chosen to form themselves into such a committee. Medical ethics which are divorced from the law of the land are likely to be merely academic and lacking in effectiveness. The Human Genome Organization, has held a series of workshops, funded by the European Community, to discuss the ethical implications of its own research. However, medical ethics and the criminal law can change. Until 1967 in the United Kingdom, it was for almost all purposes a criminal offense for a doctor to carry out a termination of pregnancy and any doctor who did so was likely to find himself not only imprisoned by the state for performing an illegal abortion, but also erased from the Medical Register.
