Editorial: “To eat an elephant”

In contrast to codes of conduct for health- care professionals that can be traced back to the Hammurabi civilization (2500 BC), contemporary bioethics is a recent phenom- enon born in the 1970s in the United States. This is a multidisciplinary field that began and has evolved in response to novel dilem- mas posed by rapid advances in science and biomedical technology. Since its incep- tion, bioethics, grounded in philosophically derived principles, is being rapidly “globalized” to all parts of the world. This includes developing countries such as Paki- stan in which societies follow a different epistemology to determine what constitutes right and wrong in life as compared to that in many industrialized nations. There is a dawning realization that the shared history of a people, indigenous cultural norms, re- ligious beliefs, and socioeconomic realities influence moral comprehension, and that these must be taken into account if bioethics is to attain a true international character [1].