ABSTRACT
The watershed year for Italian bioethics was 1997. The birth of Dolly the sheep in Scotland at the end of February 1997 caused such cultural turmoil that bioethics was given a new social status. Before Dolly’s birth, bioethics was already a growing discipline that increasingly attracted attention from educated people, but it was still a field restricted to a few specialists.1 Dolly’s birth radically changed the level and magnitude of the interest in these topics: bioethics became a matter of public debate and a source of political concern. The media has been so deeply involved in this issue, for such a length of time, that the word “bioethics” itself has become popular and has gained a place in common usage.
