Challenges and Thoughts on Improving Subject Protection during the Period of Rapid Development of Biomedical Technology / 中国医学伦理学

ABSTRACT

With the development of technologies such as gene editing, artificial intelligence, and big data, cutting-edge technologies have brought increasing ethical risks in medical research, and the ability to protect subjects has become increasingly inadequate. However, the current means of ethical governance are relatively weak, the ethical awareness of researchers is not strong, and existing ethical governance methods can no longer meet the needs of new technological developments. Therefore, combined with the Guidelines to Strengthen Governance over Ethics in Science and Technology issued by the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council in March 2022, this paper proposed that subject protection needed to be improved from the following aspects: improving regulations and systems, strengthening the construction of ethics committees, conducting research on ethical governance methods, raising the quality of ethics committees, constructing regional ethics systems, and improving the ethical literacy of researchers. To carry out the above work, it is necessary for the government, ethical professional organizations, research institutions, biomedical enterprises, medical institutions, and the public to explore the "ethical pre-examination" management model with the concept of "prevention", so as to improve the subject protection in the modern society with the continuous development of new technologies.