ABSTRACT
Modern medical biotechnology has captured the public imagination like few scientific developments since the splitting of the atom. In medical biotechnology, a standard agenda of issues has emerged during the past several years, debated in government-funded conferences and workshops, reviewed in scientific, legal, and policy journals, and reported in the popular media. The most widely discussed applications of biotechnology are in medicine and health care, particularly in the area of genetic testing and screening. More recently, modern medical technology has indefinitely extended biological life through "extraordinary life support". Until recently, our inability to make more than slight, incremental changes in human functioning spared us many difficult questions about how human beings should function. In medical biotechnology, a standard agenda of issues has emerged during the past several years, debated in government-funded conferences and workshops, reviewed in scientific, legal, and policy journals, and reported in the popular media. Biotechnology raises challenging new issues for public policy.
