Even if the term bioethics is used all over the world, its meanings are multiple and different, especially between American and European countries, depending on local cultural and medical contexts. These differences concern the issues discussed or the institutional form bioethics takes. In France, bioethics was used from the end of the 1970s and focused on research ethics and issues at the beginning of life. At the national level, a permanent commission, the was created by President François Mitterrand in 1983. (...) Its recommendations dealt essentially with procreative medicine and biomedical research ethics. (shrink)

As part of a research project, sponsored by the French Ministry of Health, comparing the role and function of French hospital ethics committees as compared to those in the United States, I was intrigued by differences that emerged. Particularly, why should it be that professional ethicists, such prominent figures in America, have no counterpart in France?

In this article we highlight the main points of the development of bioethics and ethics committees in France. We argue that the French cultural context of medicine and its current political transformations favor new models of hospital ethics committee and we provide an example of such a model developed at Paris's Institut Curie, the oldest French cancer treatment and research centre.