Does the Government Pervert Bioethics?

The road being paved to neuroethics: A path leading to bioethics or to neuroscience medical ethics?

In 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama started the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.  Concerns were expressed that government involvement in bioethics may have unforeseen and possibly dangerous repercussions to medicine.

The author emphasizes that the lessons of history chronicle that wherever governments have sought to alter medical ethics and control medical care, the results have frequently been perverse and disastrous, as in the examples of the communist Soviet Union and National Socialist (Nazi) Germany.

•  Soviet and Nazi doctors' dark descent into ghastly experimentation and brutality was a product of convoluted ethics and physicians willingly cooperating with authoritarianism citing utilitarianism in the pursuit of the 'collective' or 'greater good.' 

Thus in the 20(th) century, as governments infringed on the medical profession, even the Liberal Democracies have not been immune to the corruption of ethics in science and medicine.

Surg Neurol Int. 2014;5:146