Teaching Ethical Issues in Biomedical Engineering

In many places throughout the world, Biomedical Engineering (BME) still awaits formal recognition as a profession. Its intrinsically multi and interdisciplinary characteristics partly account for that delay. This is aggravated by the lack of precise ethical rules that delineate and delimit the professional responsibility of biomedical engineers. In this paper, some of the ethical issues that are of interest to biomedical engineers and how they can be integrated in biomedical engineering education are discussed. A program outline for bioethics, which includes the topics that should be addressed in engineering schools, is presented.