Press Releases

On 22 March 2012, in a public hearing, the German Ethics Council informed itself of the latest technological procedures of genetic diagnosis and their use in medical practice. The background to this hearing is the Opinion on the future of genetic diagnosis which the Ethics Council is currently preparing on the instructions of the Federal Government.

On 21 March, in its “Bioethics Forum” series of events, the German Ethics Council discussed new arguments on the question of when life ends and what consequences this has for transplantation medicine.

Today (Thursday) in Berlin, the German Ethics Council is presenting its Opinion on the situation of intersex people, as commissioned by the Federal Government. The Council takes the view that intersex people, as members of a society that espouses diversity, deserve the respect and support of that society. They must also be protected from undesirable medical developments and from discrimination in the community.

Yesterday (Wednesday), some three hundred attendees accepted the German Ethics Council’s invitation to join its members in the Great Hall of the University of Mannheim for a whole-day public meeting with German and international experts on the significance of synthetic biology for science and society.

Yesterday (Wednesday), the German Ethics Council invited the members of the German Bundestag to Berlin for the second of this year’s Parliamentary Evenings, to introduce its latest Opinion, Human–animal mixtures in research, and to discuss with the deputies the subjects currently on the Council’s agenda, Intersexuality and Dementia and self-determination.

The German Ethics Council has today published its Opinion on the creation of human-animal combinations in biomedical research. The document includes recommendations on work with cybrids, brain chimeras and transgenic animals.