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A common intuition says the death of a younger person is more tragic, since older people could already live through more "innings" of their life. The most important reason against using age as a criterion in triage is however the infinite value of the other: In a relationship of responsibility and care, which is the functional base of medicine also in situations of emergency, the life of each other has infinite value, and therefore cannot be weighed against each other., Competing Interests: Der Autor ist 62 Jahre alt., (Thieme. All rights reserved.)

Reproduction and the family are central elements in the lives of people, and in the narratives and practices of diverse cultures and societies. In the development of ever more powerful techniques of assisted reproduction a number of questions have emerged. They lie at the heart of what it means to reproduce, to be a parent, to be a human being. Reproductive technologies and their consideration influence perceptions and practices in regard to reproduction and beyond, thus embodying anthropological implications for the understanding of family, motherhood, health, offspring, responsibility and others. Technological capabilities and socio-cultural perceptions are strongly intertwined. The role of bioethics in this context is to explore human nascency as a process. To better understand this process and its implications for human life both medical and social, we suggest considering different perspectives on reproductive technologies to widen our understanding. These perspectives range from the potential child and its parents to health care professionals and the state. In expanding our perception of reproduction, social scientific methods can help to situate philosophical and ethical issues, thus rendering bioethical examination of reproductive technologies more socially robust. In this paper, we provide an overview of several bioethical key themes in assisted reproduction: methodological questions in regard to providing better understanding of this field, selective and inclusive social aspects of assisted reproduction, financial and governance considerations, and an applied consideration of the IVF research interface.

Ethical questions in relation to human embryos in vitro are today raised by reproductive medicine, preimplantation genetic diagnosis and stem cell research. Various discourses--biological, political and medical--describe the embryo from different perspectives. Empirical investigations of the perceptions and concerns of patients in IVF treatments provide important insights. Referring to a variety of discourses and perspectives, the paper develops an ethical analysis of the responsibility for embryos in vitro, with a special emphasis on the relationships involved. In the context of current discussions about the moral status of the embryo, the paper differentiates between four different meanings of "potentiality" of the embryo: (a) external potentiality, (b) the tendency towards a developmental pathway, (c) the transitive determination by a program, (d) preformation. For different reasons, (a), (c) and (d) are rejected. On the basis of potentiality in the sense of (b), the embryo can be described as a developmental being that gives its developmental potential continuously to the next stage ("self-transcendence") and is on the way of becoming a human. This is a reason for defending ethical responsibility for human embryos as the moral recognition of a growing dignity that becomes more intense with increasing proximity to birth.

In prenatal medicine, the doctrine of informed consent is subject to several restrictions: women are confronted with social expectations to accept screening and tests that entail a pressure to decide. Some authors criticise that the informed consent overstretches the patient, dislocates responsibility to the individual, and, in many cases, is nothing but an empty ritual. The article defends the idea of informed consent. It argues that we need to reinterpret informed consent on the basis of a dialogical principle: the aim is to recognise the subjectivity and vulnerability of the patient in her special situation, which implies a mutual culture of hearing.

Gene therapy represents a new strategy to treat human disorders. It was originally conceived as a cure for severe monogenetic disorders. Since its conception, the spectrum of possible application for gene therapy has been to include the treatment of acquired diseases, such as various forms of cancer and some viral infections, most notably human immune deficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis B virus. Since somatic gene therapy does not cause substantially new ethical problems, it has gained broad approval. This is by no means the case with germ-line gene therapy. Practically all bodies who were evaluating the related ethical aspects wanted to ban its medical application on grounds of fundamental and pragmatic considerations. In this review, practical and ethical views concerning gene therapy are summarized which were presented at the "Junitagung 1994" of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics in Basle.