| Life-sciences technologies are now being expected to contribute substantially to national security, national prestige, corporate gain, and international trade, and state and corporate leaders have taken new interest in and are acquiring new authority over life-sciences policies. Though state and corporate involvement in the work of life-sciences researchers and clinicians is not new and has always been politically and ethically provocative, the life-sciences ethical literature, as currently interpreted, speaks only infrequently and reactively to the conduct of states and corporations and to the conduct of researchers and clinicians within states and corporations.;An opening essay demonstrates the incompleteness of standard "non-political" readings of the life-sciences ethical literature by identifying, analyzing, and systematizing a distinctive political-ethical tradition in the life sciences. In parallel fashion, a second essay analyzes the ethical tradition of states and corporations, approximated as the ethics of "political realism". A series of case presentations then describes four categories of conflict involving these antithetical and antagonistic traditions. An afterward follows. |
