Biosecurity refers to measures aimed at preventing the introduction or spread of harmful organisms intentionally or unintentionally outside their native range or within new environments. In agriculture, these measures are aimed at protecting food crops and livestock from pests, invasive species, and other organisms not conducive to the welfare of the human population. The term includes biological threats to people, including those from pandemic diseases and bioterrorism. The definition has sometimes been broadened to embrace other concepts, and it is used for different purposes in different contexts.
Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health, including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions as environment, well-being and public health. Bioethics is concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, theology and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary care, other branches of medicine, ethical education in science, animal, and environmental ethics, and public health.
Medical ethics is an applied branch of ethics which analyzes the practice of clinical medicine and related scientific research. Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the case of any confusion or conflict. These values include the respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice. Such tenets may allow doctors, care providers, and families to create a treatment plan and work towards the same common goal. These four values are not ranked in order of importance or relevance and they all encompass values pertaining to medical ethics. However, a conflict may arise leading to the need for hierarchy in an ethical system, such that some moral elements overrule others with the purpose of applying the best moral judgement to a difficult medical situation. Medical ethics is particularly relevant in decisions regarding involuntary treatment and involuntary commitment.
In philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics is the study of both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience concerns the ethical, legal, and social impact of neuroscience, including the ways in which neurotechnology can be used to predict or alter human behavior and "the implications of our mechanistic understanding of brain function for society... integrating neuroscientific knowledge with ethical and social thought".
Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist. He is Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore. He was previously Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in law at Melbourne University since 2017. He directs the Biomedical Ethics Research Group and is a member of the Centre for Ethics of Pediatric Genomics in Australia. He is a former editor and current board member of the Journal of Medical Ethics, which is ranked as the No.2 journal in bioethics worldwide by Google Scholar Metrics, as of 2022. In addition to his background in applied ethics and philosophy, he also has a background in medicine and neuroscience and completed his MBBS (Hons) and BMedSc at Monash University, graduating top of his class with 18 of 19 final year prizes in Medicine. He edits the Oxford University Press book series, the Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics.
Donal O'Mathuna is an associate professor within the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University.
The Centre for Human Bioethics is the previous name of a research and teaching centre at Monash University, based in the Faculty of Arts. The centre is now known as the Monash Bioethics Centre. It focusses on the branch of ethics known as bioethics, a field relating to biological science and medicine. It was founded in October 1980 by Professors Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, as the first centre in Australia devoted to bioethics, and one of the first in the world.
Justin Oakley is a bioethicist and moral philosopher. He has been part of the revival of the ethical doctrine known as virtue ethics, an Aristotelian doctrine which has received renewed interest in the past few decades.
Helga Kuhse is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist.
Vojin B. Rakic is a Serbian philosopher and political scientist. He publishes in English, but also in Serbian. He has a PhD in political science from Rutgers University in the United States. He has published on ethics, bioethics, Kant, and cosmopolitan justice.
Michael Alan Grodin is Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, where he has received the distinguished Faculty Career Award for Research and Scholarship, and 20 teaching awards, including the "Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching." He is also Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In addition, Dr. Grodin is the Director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, and a member of the faculty of the Division of Religious and Theological Studies. He has been on the faculty at Boston University for 35 years. He completed his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his postdoctoral and fellowship training at UCLA and Harvard University.
Mildred Z. Solomon is an American bioethics researcher.
Françoise Elvina BaylisFISC is a Canadian bioethicist whose work is at the intersection of applied ethics, health policy, and practice. The focus of her research is on issues of women's health and assisted reproductive technologies, but her research and publication record also extend to such topics as research involving humans, gene editing, novel genetic technologies, public health, the role of bioethics consultants, and neuroethics. Baylis' interest in the impact of bioethics on health and public policy as well as her commitment to citizen engagement]and participatory democracy sees her engage with print, radio, television, and other online publications.
Jan Deckers works in bioethics at Newcastle University. His work revolves mainly around three topics: animal ethics, reproductive ethics and embryo research, and ethics of genetics.
S. Matthew Liao is a Taiwanese-American philosopher specializing in bioethics and normative ethics. Liao currently holds the Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics, and is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He has previously held appointments at Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Princeton.
Christine I. Mitchell is an American filmmaker and bioethicist and until her retirement in September 2022, the executive director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).
Vardit Ravitsky, an Israeli-Canadian, is a bioethicist, researcher, and author. She is president and CEO of The Hastings Center, a senior lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and past president of the International Association of Bioethics. She is a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, where she chaired the COVID-19 Impact Committee. She is also a Fellow of The Hastings Center and of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Previously, she was a full professor at the University of Montreal, and director of Ethics and Health at the Center for Research on Ethics.
Gain-of-function research is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range, i.e., the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect. This research is intended to reveal targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics. For example, influenza B can infect only humans and harbor seals. Introducing a mutation that would allow influenza B to infect rabbits in a controlled laboratory situation would be considered a gain-of-function experiment, as the virus did not previously have that function. That type of experiment could then help reveal which parts of the virus's genome correspond to the species that it can infect, enabling the creation of antiviral medicines which block this function.
Vence L. Bonham Jr. is an American lawyer who is the acting Deputy Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the U. S. National Institutes of Health, and is the leader of the NHGRI Health Disparities Unit. His research focuses on social determinants of health, particularly with regard to the social implications of new genomic knowledge and technologies.
Carrie Wolinetz is the Principal and Chair of Lewis-Burke Associate's Health and Bioscience Innovation Policy Practice Group. She formerly served in the National Institutes of Health as Senior Advisor to the Office of the Director, Associate Director for Science Policy, and Chief of Staff to Francis Collins. She also led the inaugural Health and Sciences division in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
"Dual Use Bioethics", Michael Selgelid, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford 
