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A bioethics committee evaluates proposed research activities and advises on medical and ethical issues. Members come from various backgrounds, including medicine, law, philosophy, and religion. The committee assesses ethical issues and determines whether the potential benefits of an experiment outweigh the costs and risks. Government agencies also use bioethics committees to broaden the debate on medical and ethical issues. The field can be controversial, and decisions made by the committee may not always be universally accepted.
A bioethics committee is a group of individuals who act as an advisory committee on bioethics issues. Members of the Bioethics Committee may come from a variety of backgrounds, and diversity is indeed encouraged to ensure that many perspectives are considered when evaluating issues referred to the committee. Bioethics itself combines medicine, ethics, law, philosophy, theology, politics, and many other issues, and members of a bioethics committee can include physicians, lawyers, bioethicists, medical researchers, religious officials, and many others.
In facilities that conduct research, the bioethics committee is responsible for evaluating proposed research activities and approving, recommending changes, or rejecting them. Bioethics committees were formed in part in response to public outrage about ethics violations in experimentation, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or frivolous animal experimentation that did not add to the scientific body of knowledge.
When a research proposal is submitted to a bioethics committee, members evaluate the proposal, determining what the research should accomplish, whether or not it will contribute to the field, whether it is needed, and how it will be conducted. The committee will evaluate ethical issues, deciding whether the potential ethical costs and risks of the experiment are worth the benefits. They also determine whether or not research meets institutional guidelines for research, with most bioethics committees also participating in the institutional policy formulation process.
Government agencies also use bioethics committees, using those committees to broaden the debate on medical and ethical issues. Members of that committee can assist with policy formulation, advise on specific legal cases of concern, and so on.
Science is progressing at a pace that often outpaces the speed with which people think about ethics and ethical issues. For example, researchers were studying stem cells and their potential before ethicists were talking about the ethical implications of working with stem cells and what kinds of concerns might reasonably contribute to policies that drive or limit such research. Similarly, the development of life-supporting technology has surprised many ethicists who previously had not envisioned the ways in which life could be sustained and had not considered the ethical issues associated with topics such as keeping people alive in indefinite coma. Organ donation has been another controversial topic in the field of bioethics, along with topics such as proper treatment protocols for transgender children, medical triage in emergency situations, and euthanasia.
This field can be controversial. Ethics is a challenging field and one of the reasons for having a diversity of views represented in a bioethics committee is to try to consider all aspects of a debate. However, the decisions made by such committees are not always universally accepted and the committees may even change their minds in the future with the benefit of new information.
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