Introduction

Abstract

Ethical and empirical questions of human medical research have been analysed from the perspectives of a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines. At the same time, the issue is a topic of public and political debates. Besides frequently discussed topics, such as informed consent or the appropriate assessment of risks and benefits in clinical research, new questions, such as ethical and empirical aspects in the context of “personalised medicine” and ethical issues of global medical research, have caught the interest of scholars from normative and empirical disciplines. Moreover, the development of natural and medical sciences poses new challenges to established concepts, for example, the doctrine of informed consent in the context of non-interventional human genome research.