What are the most important issues your field is facing today?
In medicine, when is the line between helping save lives cross over into play God? As medicine branches into other disciplines such as engineering, the question of ethics still remains. A main component of biomedical engineering is building and designing new tools to better the lives of patients, such as prosthetic limbs, tissue engineering, and the emerging frontier of genetic engineering; along with traditional medicine, one of the most prominent issue facing biomedical engineering is whether it should be used to just treat diseases but also enhance the lives of patients. As stated before the ethical issue of biomedical engineering can be defined as treatment versus enhancement.
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In medicine, genetic engineering consist of inserting DNA into an organism to add a characteristic the organism did not possess, or take out a damaged part of DNA to treat a genetic disorder. Although genetic engineering, also known as gene therapy, is used to try and improve the quality of life with applications in food and medicine; the moral dilemma of gene therapy is one of playing God, considering genetic engineering changes the DNA in organisms, which can be argued that changing DNA is a job for God alone; even if it improves the quality of someone’s life by producing “better” food and prevented possible genetic disorders. The more prominent moral dilemma in genetic engineering is on the horizon as genetic engineering will be used for enhancement, such as choosing the genomes that parent’s future children have, thus creating “designer babies”. Genetic engineering is arguably the most unethical branch of biomedical engineering due to the fact that not only does it cross the treatment versus enhancement boundary but also because it is the closest to playing God that anyone has ever been by deliberately changing the makeup of human