An X-Ray of Bioethics in Brazil: Pioneering Voices, Institutional and Educational Programs and Perspectives

Abstract

Bioethics, as an academic and institutionalized discipline, has existed in Brazil for nearly 20 years. It did not come to acquire its academic character until the beginning of the 1990s and, as a result, there have been few historical studies of Brazilian bioethics, or even of Latin American bioethics, which provide a critical appraisal of its development (Anjos 1994, 2000; Pessini 1995a,b,c, 1999; Garrafa 2000; Schramm 2002). Brazilian bioethics can be considered a young and overdue enterprise, which has been overly anxious to reflect upon, understand, and solve the old and new challenges brought about by technoscience and its implications for human health and biomedical research. It must face the twin challenge of addressing those “persistent problems” that are inherent to a reality marked by social inequality and exclusion, in addition to those “emergent problems” brought about by the biotechnological revolution, which affect human life and health. We consider Brazilian bioethics a young discipline because it emerged almost half a century after the approval of the Nuremberg Code (1946), which established ethical guidelines for research involving human subjects, and nearly two decades after the establishment of bioethics in the United States at the beginning of the 1970s.