Enhancement of Social Participation: Developing Bio-Ethical Analysis Skills Among Youth

The bioethical movement started as a means of overcoming the unbalanced and unprecedented influence of techno-science on human affairs. Particularly in those areas in which everybody takes contact with science and technology, the need to reappraise goals and to relieve frustration became more apparent. This has become specially important in fields of study and intervention such as medicine and biology, which seem to be closer to everyday life and whose potential for changing the human condition became relevant from the middle of the 20th century. In industrialized countries, despite all the influence of science in policies and development, people were not satisfied with the evolution shown by medicine and biology. It was a feeling of dissociation between goals and means, between what was envisioned and expected from techno-science and what ultimately came about as its outcome. As powerful social metaphors of the state of mankind, science and technology revealed themselves limited and in need of revision and improvement. In this sense, the bioethical movement of the sixties and seventies can be seen as a revival of those human values associated with any long-lasting and transcendent endeavor.