ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with ethics in biotechnology. People raise ethical questions about the use of any living organism for experimentation purposes. Bioethicists are not against the development of new drugs or new therapies; they just wanted judicious use of animals and human subjects in experimentation. The whole objective of bioethicists is to minimize trauma in living organisms during experimentation. Human experimentation was one of the first areas addressed by modern bioethicists. As a student of biotechnology, it’s very important to know the ethical issues related to biotechnology-based products and how these ethical issues affect research and product development. You may recall the huge media debate on the ethical issues related to Human Cloning and Human Embryonic Stem Cells. In this chapter, we discuss ethical issues related to genetically modified (GM) food, plants, and animals and discuss ethical issues associated with animal testing. Also discussed are ethical issues associated with xenotransplantation, human cloning, genetic screening, DNA fingerprinting, biometrics, organ transplantation, and embryonic stem cell research.
