Chapel of Reconciliation Ethics and Biology

I would like to start by thanking Rich Bowman for the invitation to speak today and by thanking all of you for coming to hear some thoughts on ethics and biology. In thinking about a specific topic for today, it occurred to me that there are several ethical issues in biology that carry a lot of emotion. As the study of living things, biology is involved in the definition of life and the treatment of the aged and the unborn. As biologists, we are rightfully charged with consideration and protection of our study subjects, which are living things or parts of living things, and the ethical issues can get be very emotional and sometimes polarizing. As a microbiologist, I can kill billions of bacteria without guilt or judgment by animal rights activists; but there are layers of protection whenever human or other animal subjects are involved. Even rodents that are generally considered undesirable carriers of disease are afforded protection when they are part of a biologist’s experiment. I had quite a choice in picking a message on ethics in biology that can be informative and delivered in 12-15 minutes. One of my friends said, “There is the obvious issue, the big one, evolution. ” At first that came as a bit of a surprise to m