ABSTRACT
The setting up of the Journal of Medical Ethics entailed a commitment to interdisciplinarity from the outset. The risk of American colonisation of the field has become much greater over the years through the amazing success of Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Both research integrity and research ethics are under increasing threat as the rich world outsources the bulk of its clinical research to poor nations that can never afford the products of the research, and when the ever-mounting pressure to publish and to patent everything possible has led to both secrecy and outright fraud. There is the contribution of legal scholars in making the discipline go beyond narrowly clinical questions to the policy dimensions of ethical quandaries in medicine and the life sciences. The work of the UK Nuffield Council on Bioethics has been especially prominent, a notable example being its work on the use and retention of DNA samples by the police.
