Berlin.
Where everything is possible
The World Congress of Bioethics (WCB) is the largest and most important international congress for bioethical research. The WCB lasts three days and is preceded by the two-day Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) congress (June 12-13). The congress has never been held in Germany before. Nevertheless, Germany has a very lively and internationally well-connected bioethics research community. Special funding programmes for ELSA research, many university chairs in medical ethics/bioethics, and a lively technology assessment community provide a perfect location for organising and attending the WCB in the geographical centre of Europe.
The organising team is a cooperation of four leading bioethics departments in Germany, located in Augsburg, Berlin, Göttingen and Heidelberg, together with the office of the German Academy of Ethics in Medicine (AEM), also located in Göttingen.
What is it About
The proposed title „Caring for the next generations. Bioethics in a world of ecological, technological, and social transformations“ for the WCB 2028 indicates a truly interdisciplinary program. It will allow for innovative reflection on how different transformation processes that occur in parallel or in intersecting ways, force to develop new ethical pathways for medical and life science research as well as public health and health care and to rethink jointly existing ethical frameworks for research, teaching, policy and practice in ways that also care for underserved communities, future generations‘ needs in medicine, public/global health, health care and medical research. Leading ethical key terms are responsibility, vulnerability and justice and how they intersect theoretically and practically.
The transformative reality requires from bioethics to engage with a broad range of ethical questions. These include the responsibilities of health care workers, and how and whether they should consider broader societal and global interests and environmental concerns. The health care sector has a substantive environmental footprint, and careful balancing of sufficiently health needs and reduction of emissions is necessary. Furthermore, healthy and sustainable ethical frameworks and considerations of inter- and intragenerational as well as global justice have to be developed, involving perspectives from medical ethics, public health ethics, global health ethics and planetary health ethics. In view of current environmental problems, bioethicists may also have to revisit early scholarship in bioethics and cooperate closer with environmental research and environmental ethics to bring back the environmental dimension in medical ethics, including Indigenous perspectives, to develop further the environmental and holistic dimensions in bioethics, medical ethics and public health ethics research.
By the complementing reflection through the ecological, technological and social transformations we aim for an innovative exchange between different disciplines and regional foci of discussions.
Regarding the ecological transformation, the climate change will make new health threats more frequent, increase multiple and intersecting vulnerabilities and global health inequities, create instances of massive demands on health services, push people and health professionals to migrate, and oblige the health sector to reduce its environment impact. Longstanding environmental problems resulting from emissions and pollution from food production, manufacturing facilities, industry, and even the health sector remain acute and are a substantial burden for future generations. Pollution of soil, air and waterways are also affecting the development of fetus and children, and increasing risks of disability and cancer as people age. Wealthier nations bear a historical and future responsibility for a significant portion of carbon emissions.
This reality requires from bioethics to engage with a broad range of ethical questions, for which normative foundations and methods need to be further refined. A better integration of health ethics with environmental ethics, critical discussions of patterns of discrimination, oppression, colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, and with inter- and intragenerational justice frameworks is needed. A closer connection with sociological, socio-epidemiological and environmental research will be fruitful. It is also helpful to revisit former scholarship in bioethics, e.g. from the 1970s, to bring back the early environmental dimension in medical ethics and public health ethics research. The role of advocacy and policy advice as well as mechanisms of epistemic and discursive injustice should be discussed again practically and theoretically in bioethics in order to contribute to just and healthy transformations that center the voices, needs and vulnerabilities of the marginalized or otherwise insufficiently visible communities.
Moreover, ecological transformation cannot be separated from technological transformation. In many areas, technology innovation serves as source as well as solution for ecological challenges. The advent of modern data science and biotechnology has not only left no stone unturned in research. It has also found its way into everyday clinical practice – with far-reaching ethical consequences that are not yet fully assessed. The utilization of huge amounts of personal health data as well as the creation of huge biobanks raise questions of consent, privacy, data ownership, and sustainability. Advanced machine learning systems promise a biomedical revolution, but threaten principles of autonomy, equal access, and non-discrimination. Omics-based research poses additional challenges regarding the boundaries of genetic enhancement, the danger of dual-use, and the commercialization of the resulting technologies. Finally, the growing carbon footprint of data-driven AI technologies and their insatiable need for raw materials raise pressing questions about their adverse environmental impact and consequences for future generations.
The progress within these fields requires a delicate balance between technological advancement and an ethical framework that relies on rigorous analyses of the broader ethical and social implications of these technologies. Therefore, social transformation also needs to be considered systematically. Bioethics needs to develop adequate frameworks for integrative normative analysis. On the one hand, many countries have recently witnessed increasing political and economical polarizations within societies, that often go along with an exclusionary, anti-humanistic, anti-scientific and discriminatory policy. Additionally, the significant number and consequences of armed conflicts within and between countries or regions provide a threat to a peaceful, socially secured living conditions for citizens. Such armed conflicts produce many bioethical conflicts, ranging from triage questions in health care to the ethics of dual-use of knowledge for military or other problematic purposes. On the other hand, both within countries as well as transnationally, people show an increased sensitivity about questions of structural marginalization and injustice, recognize diversity as a fundamental value in pluralistic societies, and organize to stand up for social and structural justice. In a globalized world, questions of mobility rights, migration and displacement are entangled with poverty, racism, manifold inequalities and asymmetric power structures. A primary concern is therefore to develop further critical approaches towards medical and public and global health systems of knowledge and education from an inclusive, deliberative, feminist or anti-ableist perspective.
Against this background, global care chains in ageing societies or struggles for reproductive rights and new practices like surrogate motherhood raise complex ethical questions of autonomy, dependencies, voluntariness, social inequalities, and justice that warrant attention from medical and global health ethics. In societies characterized by times of increasing polarizations, digitalization is connected to ethical questions on how to navigate problems of information, disinformation and misinformation.
The WCB 2028 will address the following questions:
The WCB 2028 will include plenary sessions, symposia, individual presentations, oral rapid pitches and poster sessions. At the end of the congress all WCB presenters will be invited to submit their Congress papers to a special issue of the Journal Bioethics.
The Team Behind It
The German Academy of Ethics in Medicine (AEM), founded in 1986, is an interdisciplinary and interprofessional medical ethics association. It has set itself the goal of promoting public and scientific discourse on ethical issues in medicine, nursing and healthcare. Its work focuses on organizing conferences and symposia, publishing the journal Ethics in Medicine, promoting young scientists and training people who work in clinical ethics consultation.
The AEM coordinates the works of scholars and practitioners from a vast range of disciplines. Seeing itself as a forum for different points of views and convictions, its members include doctors, nurses, philosophers, theologians, lawyers and members of other professions.
However, the work of the AEM does not only concern clinical ethics in the narrower sense. It also deals with socio-philosophical perspectives on the healthcare system, questions of bioethics, environmental ethics, organizational ethics and many more. In 19 working groups, members of the AEM deal with various questions and problems, from ethics didactics to the use of digital technologies, cultural diversity and feminist perspectives in healthcare.
Drawing from this pool of diverse perspectives and looking back on a history of almost 40 years, the AEM has plenty of experience in organizing and conducting scientific conferences. Since 1990, its annual conference provides an opportunity for scientists from various fields to exchange views on current issues in medical ethics. Furthermore, the AEM is organizing a second annual transdisciplinary conference, the Spring Conference, from 2024 onwards.
The Institute for Ethics and History of Health in Society (IEHHS) at the Medical Faculty of the University of Augsburg works on ethical and historical perspectives on medicine and health in its clinical, scientific, social and political contexts. The IEHHS contributes to an ethically and historically informed discussion of norms and values in medicine, science, politics and the public. International networking and interdisciplinary scientific collaboration are particularly important to the team.
With the research and teaching priorities, the institute’s team takes into account dimensions that include but also go beyond the clinical context. The connection to public / global health, justice and human rights, science, politics, society and the global dimension including decolonial and Indigenous perspectives is important. This orientation also fits into the socially highly relevant research priorities of the Medical Faculty at the University of Augsburg: digitalization in health and climate health.
The institute works in an interdisciplinary manner (medicine, public health, history, ethics, sociology, gender studies, political science, law, etc.). Lively scientific and public relations activities are important to the IEHHS. It regularly organizes seminars and workshops (e.g. Ethics@Lunch, Medicine without Racism) and is active in numerous networks and commissions (e.g. Ethics of AI in Healthcare, Academy of Ethics in Medicine Germany, European Association of Centers of Medical Ethics, German Society for Public Health, Genomics England, German Human Genome-Phenome Archive, UK-FR Genomics and Ethics Network, WHO committees, editorial boards of journals, leadership of ethics working groups in the Academy of Ethics in Medicine, in the German Society for Public Health and the British Society for Genetic Medicine).
The Institute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin is an important center for medical ethics research, practice, and teaching. The Institute is involved in various tasks related to clinical ethics, research ethics and ethics teaching. It participates in different study programs at the Berlin Universities, chairs the Clinical Ethics Committee and the expert group on ethics counselling at the Charité, and supports different research ethics Committees at the Charité and its two mother universities, Free University and Humboldt-University Berlin.
In terms of research, the Institute is a site for innovative medical ethics and medical humanities research with local, national and international cooperation partners from research and practice. Topics include ethical competency and teaching research, clinical ethics, questions of healthcare delivery, and structural and institutional discrimination and health.
As part of the Charité, recently ranked among the 10 world’s best hospitals in the international Newsweek rankings, the Institute is in close contact with important stakeholders on all levels, including the public, politics, patients organizations, researchers and clinicians, and provides structures to foster dialogues with all parties on relevant ethical topics within healthcare practice and research.
The Institute of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University Medical Center Göttingen has long standing experiences with international collaborations and provides established bioethics networks (e.g. with US, Canada, India, Israel, UK, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Sweden, Nigeria). It has organized in the last two decades more than 15 international conferences on topics such as autonomy and trust in bioethics, ethics of ageing medicine, and intercultural bioethics. The Dept.’s leadership has been providing ethical policy advice in different advisory boards (e.g. German Ethics Council, Federal Ethics Committee for Stem Cell Research, DFG/Leopoldina Committee for security-critical research).
Research topics of the institute are manifold and range from classical bioethical topics such as ethics of reprogenetics, end of life decisions, organ transplantation and personalized medicine to more current topics such as participatory ethics, intergenerational and collective bioethics, ethics of technology and of science.
The department’s team is composed of experts from various disciplines, including bioethics, the social sciences, philosophy, political science, nursing ethics, cultural anthropology, the history of medicine and health technology assessment. The team has developed participatory methodologies to proactively engage patients, citizens, people with dementia, children and young people, and people from diverse communities in bioethics, with the aim of overcoming existing power asymmetries in bioethical discourse.
The Institute for Medical and Data Ethics (IMD) at the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University is headed by Prof. Dr. Dr. Eva Winkler and brings together an interdisciplinary team of 15 researchers from the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences.
The IMD’s mission is to explore ethical challenges at the cutting edge of medicine and healthcare. Its research spans research ethics (genome sequencing and editing, patient participation), clinical ethics (end-of-life decisions, data driven medicine and AI ethics, organizational ethics in healthcare and precision medicine) and public health ethics (resource allocation, secondary use of health data for research).
With its team, the IMD has access to a wide-ranging national and international research network and experience in planning and organizing international conferences (e.g. March 2024 and July 2025: International Conferences on Genomic Newborn Screening). The IMD’s expertise is represented in its participation in numerous initiatives and committees (e.g. German Ethics Council, Central Ethics Commission of the German Medical Association, UK-FR GENE network, German Human Genome-Phenome Archive (GHGA), 1+Million Genomes Initiative, Genomic Data Infrastructure Project (GDI), Network of University Medicine (NUM), Medical Informatics Initiative (MII), EURAT platform - Ethical and Legal Aspects of Translational Medicine).
In terms of research, the Institute is a site for innovative medical ethics and medical humanities research with local, national and international cooperation partners from research and practice. Topics include ethical competency and teaching research, clinical ethics, questions of healthcare delivery, and structural and institutional discrimination and health.
As part of the Charité, recently ranked among the 10 world’s best hospitals in the international Newsweek rankings, the Institute is in close contact with important stakeholders on all levels, including the public, politics, patients organizations, researchers and clinicians, and provides structures to foster dialogues with all parties on relevant ethical topics within healthcare practice and research.
