Dignity in some of its modern usages has come to mean the right of a person to be valued and respected for their own sake, and to be treated ethically. In this context, it is of significance in morality, ethics, law and politics as an extension of the Enlightenment-era concepts of inherent, inalienable rights. The term may also be used to describe personal conduct, as in "behaving with dignity".
Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
Giovanni Berlinguer was an Italian politician, humanist, and professor of social medicine.
The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) is an international non-governmental organization of 40 international, national, and associate member groups representing the biomedical science community. It was jointly established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1949 as a successor to the International Medical Congress that organized 17 conferences from 1867 until the 1913 outbreak of World War One.
The Hastings Center is an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute and think tank based in Garrison, New York. It was instrumental in establishing the field of bioethics and is among the most prestigious bioethics and health policy institutes in the world.
Stem cell research policy varies significantly throughout the world. There are overlapping jurisdictions of international organizations, nations, and states or provinces. Some government policies determine what is allowed versus prohibited, whereas others outline what research can be publicly financed. Of course, all practices not prohibited are implicitly permitted. Some organizations have issued recommended guidelines for how stem cell research is to be conducted.
Christoph Beat Graber (*1960) is a Swiss legal scholar and professor of legal sociology with particular focus on media law at the University of Zurich since 2015. He was previously a founding member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne and a consultant to various Swiss federal offices and the OECD on communication, cultural and copyright law issues.
The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine, otherwise known as the European Convention on Bioethics or the European Bioethics Convention, is an international instrument aiming to prohibit the misuse of innovations in biomedicine and to protect human dignity. The Convention was opened for signature on 4 April 1997 in Oviedo, Spain and is thus otherwise known as the Oviedo Convention. The International treaty is a manifestation of the effort on the part of the Council of Europe to keep pace with developments in the field of biomedicine; it is notably the first multilateral binding instrument entirely devoted to biolaw. The Convention entered into force on 1 December 1999.
The International Bioethics Committee (IBC) of UNESCO is a body composed of 36 independent experts from all regions and different disciplines that follows progress in the life sciences and its applications in order to ensure respect for human dignity and human rights. It was created in 1993 by Dr Federico Mayor Zaragoza, General Director of UNESCO at that time. It has been prominent in developing Declarations with regard to norms of bioethics that are regarded as soft law but are nonetheless influential in shaping the deliberations, for example, of research ethics committees and health policy.
Nikola Biller-Andorno is a German bioethicist. She is Professor and Director of the Institute of Biomedical Ethics of the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Stephen Garrard Post has served on the Board of the John Templeton Foundation (2008-2014), which focuses on virtue and public life. He is a researcher, opinion leader, medical school professor, and best-selling author who has taught at the University of Chicago Medical School, Fordham University-Marymount, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (1988-2008) and Stony Brook University School of Medicine (2008-). He is widely known for his research on the ways in which giving can enhance the health and happiness of the giver, how empathy and compassionate care contribute to patient outcomes, ethical issues in caring for people with dementia, medical professionalism and the virtues, and positive psychology in relation to health and well-being. Post is an elected member of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Royal Society of Medicine, London. He was selected nationally as the Public Member of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Composite Committee (2000-2005), and was reappointed for outstanding contributions.
Daniel Thürer is a Swiss jurist and professor emeritus of international, comparative constitutional, and European law at the University of Zurich. He is a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and of the Institut de Droit International, and presides the German International Law Association. Currently, he is a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.
The President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research was a bioethics organization in the United States.
Jože Trontelj (1939–2013) was a Slovenian physician, doctor of neurosciences, and bioethicist. From 2008 to 2013, he was the President of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He authored or co-authored over 150 papers in journals, over 30 book chapters and 3 books, mainly on electromyography and physiological basis of neurological disorders, and over 70 publications on bioethical issues.
Claudia Wiesemann is a German medical ethicist and medical historian. She is full professor and head of the Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at Göttingen University Medical Center. Being a member of the German Ethics Council since 2012, she was elected Deputy Chair in 2016.
Henk Antonius Maria Johannes ten Have is Professor emeritus at the Center for Healthcare Ethics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, U.S.A. where he has been Director since 2010. Previously, he served in UNESCO as Director of the Division of Ethics of Science and Technology (2003–2010). His recent works are: Global Bioethics—An Introduction (2016), Vulnerability—Challenging Bioethics (2016), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics (2016), and Wounded Planet (2019).
Intersex people in Switzerland have no recognition of rights to physical integrity and bodily autonomy, and no specific protections from discrimination on the basis of sex characteristics. In 2012, the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics published a report on the medical management of differences of sex development or intersex variations.
Judit Sándor is a Hungarian lawyer, bioethicist, and author, as well as full professor at the Department of Political Science, Department of Legal Studies and the Department of Gender Studies of the Central European University (CEU), Budapest. She had a bar exam in Hungary before she conducted legal practice at Simmons & Simmons in London. In 1996 she received Ph.D. in law and political science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Patricia A. King is a professor of law emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center and an adjunct professor in the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Her expertise lies at the intersection of law, medicine, ethics, and public policy. In 1979, she became the first African-American woman law professor to receive tenure at Georgetown.
