Rakefet Zalasik: Catalogue data in Spring Semester 2022

Name	Dr. Rakefet Zalasik
Address	Lehre Geistes-,Soz.-u.Staatswiss. ETH Zürich, RZ G 4 Clausiusstrasse 59 8092 Zürich SWITZERLAND
E-mail	rakefetj.zalashik@gess.ethz.ch
Department	Humanities, Social and Political Sciences
Relationship	Visiting Professor

Number	Title	ECTS	Hours	Lecturers
851-0433-00L	Bioethics and the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Comparative, Interdisciplinary Outlook	2 credits	1S	R. Zalasik
Abstract	The course deals with impact of the Holocaust on discourse of bioethics in Israel, the U.S. and Germany from the end of WWII until the present. It explores the questions how and to what extent Nazi medical crimes (euthanasia, human medical experiments, involvement of German doctors in the murder of handicaps, mentally ill, Jews and concentration camps prisoners) has influenced medical practice.
Learning objective	The course aims to critically explore the development of bioethics and the shadow of the Holocaust Israel, Germany and the U.S. constructing a triangle of the representative of the victims, the perpetrators and the victorious with the emphasize on beginning and end life, fertilization technologies and informed consent.
Content	Bioethics in its current form has emerged only after World War II. The influence of the Holocaust played a direct role in its development especially with the Nuremburg doctors’ trials and the creation of the “Nuremberg Code”, which was written by American doctors and jurists in an effort to avoid the recurrence of such medical atrocities and to clearly differentiate between the crimes committed by Nazi doctors and ordinary medical research. A common claim is that the Holocaust had a deep influence on the birth of bioethics, and the Nuremberg code, being a watershed moment in its history. In contrast, some scholars contend that the Nuremberg trials and the Nuremberg Code had a rather limited influence on the development of bioethics.