Customer Reviews

BioIndustry Ethics

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This book provides a useful range of case-studies, illustrating how various biotech and companies pharmaceutical companies have dealt with ethical issues. This is useful for two reasons:
1) If you want to understand why companies do what they do, you need some insight into their internal decision-making;
2) The companies profiled in BioIndustry Ethics are not perfect, ethically, but each of them has made at least some effort to do better. So at least in THAT sense, they serve as positive examples of ways other companies can move foreward.

My main complaint is with the final chapter, which attempts to summarize the lessons learned from the book's various case-studies. Unfortunately, the result is relatively weak. The chapter adopts a rather one-sided view of the bottom-line value of ethics to a corporation, implying that adopting an explicit focus on ethics, for example, is a sure-and-easy route to profit. (There is in fact a literature debating that issue, in the field of Business Ethics.)

Still, the book is overall a very valuable contribution.