Abstract

One of the remarkable tendencies of scientific and technological progress during the last decades consists in a rapidly growing development and the use of new technologies for interventions into human beings; usually these interventions performed by means of biomedical technologies. Fields of application of such technologies are the human body and/or mind. We can term these technologies as human-directed, taking into account the fact of their directedness not so much by humans as to humans. The shift towards the human being as the main target of technological and engineering activities generates many ethical problems. There are some areas inside and nearby individual human existence, which are the most appropriate for effective application of human-directed technologies. I shall call them ‘boundary’, or ‘transitory zones’. The simplest example is a zone between human life and death. This zone can be thought of as a span of indefiniteness between two states of an individual human existence: definitely alive and definitely dead. In comparison with both these adjacent spaces, the span is extremely a thin one. Interventions performed in these transitory zones brings forth, along with biological, medical, technological problems, a lot of social, legal and ethical dilemmas. In other words, this boundary zone is fraught not only with promising scientific and technological advances, but with the attendant and often rather difficult ethical choices.