Medicine as a Practice and the Ethics of Illness

Abstract

Current developments in the biomedical sciences are going to produce profound changes in the nature of medicine in the near future. One can recall the immense revolutionary power of molecular medicine in relation to the way diseases will be treated and prevented once the Human Genome Project is completed and treatments apply more and more extensively the knowledge thus obtained: not only will diseases with a genetic basis have a clear diagnosis, but other illnesses will benefit as well from treatment deriving from the use of recombinant DNA techniques. The present image of medicine as a mainly surgical and pharmacological enterprise will be profoundly modified by the increasing presence of a biotechnological drift, centered on cells and particularly on DNA. This change represents a dramatic shift in the ability to fight diseases, since in most cases we will be able to radically remove the cause of a disease (a gene) or to modify the genetic endowment so as to make an organism resistant to a specific disease.