Ethics and biomedical engineering education: the continual defiance.

All engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility. BM engineers are expected to be introduced to ethics at the beginning of their career. The ethical issues to be included in the curriculum and their extent still represent a challenge in Biomedical Engineering education. In this paper we present the outline of an Ethics program of study for engineering students. We discuss some of the topics that must integrate the courses on the foundations and on the practice of Ethics, as Biomedical Engineering schools must prepare professionals able to perform their duties under strong moral standards.