Bioethics is the ethics of biological science and medicine. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, philosophy, and theology.
While scientific research has produced social benefits, it has also posed some troubling ethical questions. Public attention was drawn to these questions by abuses of human subjects in biomedical experiments, especially during the Second World War. During the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, the Nuremberg code was drafted as a set of standards for judging physicians and scientists who had conducted biomedical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. This code is often credited with jump starting the interdisciplinary field now called bioethics.
