Bioethics as it stands today is a typically American
product, but whether it can be spread across the globe
as easily as Coca-Cola remains to be seen. Historically,
we can observe that the internationalization of bioethics
has taken place in a form of concentric waves beginning
in the United States and encompassing increasingly new
territories having older roots. Born in the 1960s, bioethics
as the study of ethical issues in life sciences began to
permeate the Anglo-Saxon world. Ten years later it penetrated
countries with developed liberal democratic traditions
and remnants of the different Protestant attitudes to life
where issues such as patients' rights, abortion, euthanasia,
eugenics quickly started to appear frequently in newspapers,
magazines, and on television. Then in the '80s the
bioethics wave swept into the European community, and by
the end of the '80s and early '90s bioethics
advanced timidly into Eastern Europe. Because the difficult
birth of bioethics in Eastern Europe is not widely known,
the purpose here is to provide a perspective of that development,
including its struggle with a totalitarian legacy, as well as to
offer some comments as to how current cultural gaps between East
and West, and especially between the Western and Orthodox worlds,
might be bridged.