[The development of bioethics as a scientific discipline and the essence of bioethics].

The author examines the patterns and predictors of newly emerging branch of science such as bioethics that originated on the background of a revolutionary situation in the history of biomedicine as the need for a new ethic that would confront the challenges brought about by scientific and technological development to humanity. Exploring many different kinds of bioethics issues, the author concludes that the essence of bioethics is that it is not only a scientific and practical discipline, but it is also a weltanschauung. Only with such an approach the spectrum of functions inherent in bioethics is expanded.