Abstract
Ethical issues in medical science in the 1990s will be numerous, occur in all disciplines of medicine, and affect all physicians. To discuss future medical ethical issues in a relatively short space, it is tempting to choose one of two extremes. One extreme is to simply catalog all ethical problems arising from new discoveries or emerging technologies, while the other extreme would be to choose one ethical issue as most important and attempt to cover it in depth. In this two-part paper, I have chosen a middle ground, providing some background on five issues in medium depth: (1) euthanasia, (2) fetal tissue transplant, (3) psychiatry and neuroscience (specifically the issues raised by homosexuality), (4) health care costs and the ethics of cost containment, and finally (5) preventive medicine, particularly as it relates to sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. I hope to supply some background information on these selected issues and to stimulate further reading and research.