Describe how you think that ethics intersects with biology. You can make this as broad or specific as you would like!
Respond to two of your peers:
#1
Ethics and biology are two schools of thought that complement each other. Following a code of ethics is essential in biology because the evidence and information we discover can have many positive applications and many negative applications. It is important that our work is of value to society and having a code of ethics guides our conduct. Biology is also useful to ethics because biological evidence can be used to promote theories or ideas. A controversial topic that concerns biology and ethics is the topic of abortion. Advocates and opposers both use biological claims about the body to support their argument. This is just one of many examples of how ethics and biology intersect.
#2
To me, ethics and biology go hand in hand, especially in a healthcare setting. The main reason being is that there are people treating other people, and in some cases, one’s life is held in the hands of another. For this reason, its essential for a healthcare provider to act ethically to not put another’s life in jeopardy. These two are so intertwined now that there is an entire field of work dedicated to bioethics. Bioethics exists in order to protect both healthcare providers and patients from abuse. There is a law of informed consent that requires full disclosure of side effects and potential outcomes to patients from everything to prescribing medication to surgery. Bioethics are also necessary to *try* to make sure that people of all cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic status are treated equally. One example that comes to mind is one that I have seen through my History of Science, History of Medicine, as well as Bioethics classes- the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. This study spanned decades, and involved poor black men who were afflicted with Syphilis. These men were tricked into believing they were being treated, even though they were not, even when it was discovered that penicillin was a treatment for the disease. These researchers even went out of their way to make sure these men did not get treatment anywhere else. Due to the stereotypes of these men because of their color and socioeconomic standings, they were not even seen as human beings. Thankfully, today there are laws in place to protect these types of things from happening thank to bioethics.
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