Bioética y tecnociencias de la vida

This paper is intended to outline the correlation between Bioethics and the techno-scientific revolutions initiated by genomics and neurobiology (briefly described herein), emphasising the two-tier power of such technologies: as a means of knowledge and as a tool that may alter the micro-realities found. The challenge for Bioethics is to discern the ambivalence of these new powers and knowledge, as well as to determine, through different paths (from committees to UNESCO resolutions), what the detrimental and inadmissible aspects harmful to human condition, human dignity and human existence itself are. I state that the new scientific truths found by molecular biology serve to enrich our insight of what is human, but that such knowledge is not restricted to those truths, nor does it allow us to confine the whole comprehension of humanity to a merely biological perspective. On the one hand, we have the bio-scientific insight of the biological nature of human beings and, on the other, we have the human ontological, historical, cultural and ethical nature.