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When Sigmund Freud published his reflections on modern civilization, for example, in Civilization and Its Discontents, he could not yet anticipate the enormous developments in modern technology in the life sciences in the 20th and 21st centuries. Do these developments confront us more and more with new facets of a Faustian seduction? Are we increasingly ‘playing God’ as many contemporary critical authors of modernity are claiming?
Technique has always been and still is part of culture and thus of human nature. Without techniques we would be unable to live and to master our lives. However, techniques, once developed, force us to make responsible decisions about whether and how we want to use them. We also have to find forms of coping with the ambivalences and dilemmas which are connected to most modern technologies.
The panel, ‘The Medea Fantasy: An Inevitable Burden During Prenatal Diagnostics?’, was devoted to the particularly sensitive field of prenatal and genetic diagnostics. Professor Spiros Simitis (Frankfurt/Main), who chaired the panel, has been the head of the German National Ethics Council. In his introduction he gave an overview on the current political debates on bio-ethics in the field of genetic and prenatal diagnostics (PND) and on how to use stem cells from embryos after artificial insemination. Achievements in genetic research produce ethical and moral dilemmas which need to be the subject of reflection and debate in modern societies. Denial of ambivalences that moral dilemmas arouse constitutes a threat to societies as well as to individual persons.
Stephan Hau (Stockholm), the first presenter, gave an overview on an Euro-pean-wide study, Ethical dilemmas due to prenatal and genetic diagnostics (EDIG), which was carried out from 2005 to 2008 (Leuzinger-Bohleber, Engels and Tsiantis, 2008). A large interdisciplinary research team investigated the above-mentioned dilemmas. The existence of PND confronts women and their partners with a variety of moral d