“Narrowness” and “Broadness” of Bioethics: on some Middle-European and Mediterranean Initiatives*
Today, we know who came to the idea in the 1970s in the United States that numerous contemporary issues, particularly provoked by the progress of medicine and technology, be unified by the notion of ‘’bioethics’’. Coining the new term by shortening ‘’biological science’’ and ‘’ethics’’, Van Rensselaer Potter (1911-2001) certainly acheived this as the first American, without the knowledge of German and without having the slightest surmise that he had been outrun by a humble theologian and teacher from Halle, Fritz Jahr (1895- 1953), whose work would be discovered at the very end of the 20th century. How the word ‘’bioethics’’ first appeared in Potter’s paper from 1970,3 and eventually the book from 1971,4 and how it got incomparablely larger publicity thanks to the April 19, 1971 edition of Time magazine, was studied and described by Warren Reich in his two papers.
