ETHICS OF TEACHING - ETHICS IN RESEARCH - 2 NEGLECTED DUTIES OF THE UNIVERSITIES

Ethics in medicine is a neglected subject in many German medical schoo ls. If it is mentioned in the students' education, the focus is on the patient - physician interaction and the physician's making decisions. Values and norms which influence the processes of learning ethics are very rarely taken into consideration, Physicians are not trained to r eflect their own values neither before they start to teach nor while t hey teach medicine or research practices. This would be very necessary for the teaching of ethics to medical students and of research ethics in the laboratory. Teaching ethics and research ethics are not well d eveloped, too. The medical faculty has three scopes of duties: health care, teaching and research - and all of these fields can be analyzed and structured with the help of Pellegrino's system: ''The Moral Event ''. Nephrology is one field in medicine where all these ethical proble ms and fields of conflicts appear.