First, I am going to tell you what I am not going to do. I am not going to argue about the distinction between therapy and enhancement.

In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human (...) history. (shrink)

The author demonstrates that professional bioethics is culturally very risk averse when it comes to evaluating the possible ethical consequences of new technologies such as genetic testing, human embryonic stem cells, and reproductive cloning. Deeper involvement in the Federal regulatory process by bioethicists will exacerbate this tendency toward risk aversion. This cultural bias toward caution will tempt many bioethicists to look to the so-called precautionary principle for policy guidance. Adopting the precautionary principle would harm patients by slowing the development of (...) new therapies. The author argues that bioethicists should reject the precautionary principle and instead rely on conscientious trial and error as a superior way to approach implementing new biomedical technologies ethically. (shrink)