
Biosafety course cover a variety of topics that address multiple regulations, standards, and guidelines. They are intended to complement the hands-on training and experience that those handling biohazards obtain from their principal investigators, laboratory managers, and fellow researchers.
Biosafety cabinets (BSCs) are one type of biocontainment equipment used in biological laboratories to provide personnel, environmental, and product protection.
"Good Laboratory Practice", or GLP for short, refers to a quality assurance system that is applied during the pre-clinical stage of research and development. Its aim is to test active ingredients under specific environmental conditions and over a defined period of time.
What is donning and doffing? The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was established in 1938 to protect workers' rights. According to the FLSA, the term “donning and doffing” is used to refer to the practice of putting on (donning) and taking off (doffing) protective gear, clothing, and uniforms.
Incident reporting is the process of recording worksite events, including near misses, injuries, and accidents. It entails documenting all the facts related to incidents in the workplace. Incidents are generally accidents or events that cause injuries to workers or damages to property or equipment.
Risk assessment is a term used to describe the overall process or method where you: Identify hazards and risk factors that have the potential to cause harm (hazard identification). Analyze and evaluate the risk associated with that hazard (risk analysis, and risk evaluation).
Healthcare ethics is the collection of principles that guide doctors, nurses, and other clinicians in providing medical care. It combines moral beliefs — a sense of right and wrong — with a sense of the provider's duty toward others. Healthcare ethics covers how providers treat patients.
Genetically modified organisms are at the forefront of modern agriculture and causing significant controversy. The ethical dilemma arises from the risks that come with the growth and production of GM plants and animals, which due to the novelty of the science may not be fully understood.
A genetically modified organism (GMO) is an animal, plant, or microbe whose DNA has been altered using genetic engineering techniques.
Five sets of ethical concerns have been raised about GM crops: potential harm to human health; potential damage to the environment; negative impact on traditional farming practices; excessive corporate dominance; and the 'unnaturalness' of the technology.
In bioethics, the ethics of cloning refers to a variety of ethical positions regarding the practice and possibilities of cloning, especially human cloning. While many of these views are religious in origin, some of the questions raised by cloning are faced by secular perspectives as well.
What is ethics on reproduction?
The phrase 'reproductive ethics', as used by bioethicists, typically refers to concerns over morally appropriate employment of assisted reproductive technologies and, perhaps somewhat less commonly, to issues arising from technologies that block conception or end pregnancies.
Patents demonstrate that a biotech company has the freedom to commercialize its product without infringing on the intellectual property rights of other companies, and preventing others from selling the same invention for a certain period of time.
A biological patent is a patent on an invention in the field of biology that by law allows the patent holder to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing the protected invention for a limited time.
A transplant is a surgical procedure in which tissue or an organ is transferred from one area of a person's body to another area, or from one person (the donor) to another person (the recipient). Some ethical issues are raised including:
Is the body a commodity? Can it be bought?
2) How should decisions be made on distributing scarce organs?
3) When several healthy organs are available, should they all go to one person or should several needy people each receive just one?
While Eugenics is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population.
Biosafety prevents large-scale loss of biological integrity, focusing both on ecology and human health. These prevention mechanisms include the conduction of regular biosafety reviews in laboratory settings and strict guidelines to follow. Biosafety is used to protect from harmful incidents. Many laboratories handling biohazards employ an ongoing risk management assessment and enforcement process for biosafety. Failures to follow such protocols can lead to an increased risk of exposure to biohazards or pathogens. Human error and poor technique contribute to unnecessary exposure and compromise the best safeguards for protection.
Biosafety is related to several fields:
In ecology (referring to imported life forms from beyond ecoregion borders),
In agriculture (reducing the risk of alien viral or transgenic genes, genetic engineering, or prions such as BSE/"MadCow", reducing the risk of food bacterial contamination)
In medicine (referring to organs or tissues of biological origin, genetic therapy products, viruses; levels of lab containment protocols measured as 1, 2, 3, 4 in rising order of danger),
In chemistry (i.e., nitrates in water, PCB levels affecting fertility)
In exobiology (i.e., NASA's policy for containing alien microbes that may exist on space samples. See planetary protection and interplanetary contamination), and
In synthetic biology (referring to the risks associated with this type of lab practice)
Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health (primarily focused on the human but also increasingly includes animal ethics), including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society (what decisions are "good" or "bad" and why) and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions such 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 ("the ethics of the ordinary"), ethical education in science, animal, and environmental ethics, and public health.
Bioethics as a field of professional practice (although not a formal profession) developed initially in North America in the 1980s and 1990s, in the areas of clinical/medical ethics and research ethics. Slowly internationalizing as a field, since the 2000s professional bioethics has expanded to include other specialties, such as organizational ethics in health systems, public health ethics, and more recently Ethics of artificial intelligence. Professional ethicists may be called consultants, ethicists, coordinators, or even analysts; and they may work in healthcare organizations, government agencies, and in both the public and private sectors. They may be full-time employees, independent consultants, or have cross-appointments with academic institutions, such as research centers or universities.
Learned societies and professional associations
The field of bioethics has developed national and international learned societies and professional associations, such as the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the Canadian Bioethics Society, the Canadian Association of Research Ethics Boards, the Association of Bioethics Program Directors, the Bangladesh Bioethics Society and the International Association of Bioethics