[Ethical evaluation of biomedical research].

Every human behaviour, therefore also biomedical research, implies a reference, either implicit or explicit, to ethic values. The expression "biomedical research" attains to the domain of two distinct fields, the scientific and the technical one and this distinction is important for its ethic implications. In fact, it was the great progress in the biotechnologies that in the early 70's stimulated the birth of a new discipline known as bioethics, that from its very start was meant to be the meeting point between culturers of the biological sciences and those of human sciences. Among the paradigms adopted by bioethics, those of Beauchamp and Childress, which refer to the principles of "beneficence" (well doing), "non maleficence" (not wrong doing), autonomy and justice, are still of great importance. Bioethics proposed to establish an inequivocal and shared language and to develop adequate and rigorous procedures of analysis. So, at various levels, international, national and local, those interesting tools of the trade, which are the ethics committees, have arose. In order for an ethic committee to function, one must guarantee from the start, the conditions of autonomy and representativeness of different knowledges and cultural options that characterize our complex society. It is also necessary that an ethics committee, rather than assuming a prescriptive role, should promote attention and reflection on the ethical aspects of biomedical research.