Medical ethics started with several early codes of ethics. One of the best known is the ancient Greek Hippocratic Oath, which required physicians above all to “do no harm.” There were also professional codes of ethics such as the one written by English physician Thomas Percival in the 18th century that provided a foundation for the first code of ethics established in 1846 by the founders of the American Medical Association. The Nuremberg Code for research ethics on human subjects was established during the war crime trials at the close of World War II in response to the heinous abuses in human experimentation performed in Nazi Germany. The approach of new medical and reproductive technologies after the 1950s further complicated the moral and societal iss

Life-support became more advanced and affluent in the 1960s, and many problems arose, with the growth of medical ethics as its own distinct field. For centuries, death was clearly defined by no pulse and no breathing. Now with the new technologies in life support, there was a blurred line of what death’s signs were. Medical ethicists struggled to define death in a new way, so that the gravely ill would have the right to live maintained by technology, while those who had technically died would not be maintained on life-support machines. In the United States, many states have adopted legislation formally recognizing brain death—the loss of brain function, which controls respiration and heartbeat—as certification of death. Most European nations, Canada, Australia, and Central and South American nations define death either as the loss of all independent lung and heart function or the permanent and irreversible loss of all brain function.

Fertility is also an important area of medical ethics. Many couples who are unable to have children turn to fertility-enhancing technologies for help. Artificial insemination raised new ethical issues about how potential parents should choose sperm or egg donors, on what basis and with what guarantees of privacy should donors be enlisted, and whether donors are able to have parental rights.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland made the first successful mammalian clone. It was first announced on February 22, 1997. This was not when it was cloned though; it really occurred in late January 1996. They took a mammary cell from a sheep and put it into an egg. This made the egg think it was fertilized. They let this egg grow into an embryo and then transplanted this fused embryo and put it in the recipient ewe, acting as a surrogate mother. On July 5 at 4 P.M., Dolly was born in a shed down the road from the institute. She weighed in at 14½ pounds and healthy.

In 1978 the birth of the first test-tube baby (a method in which fertilization of the ovum with sperm was conducted in a laboratory and the resulting embryo was then implanted in the mother's uterus), was an important technological breakthrough. This brought many ethical issues, including the possibility of multiple births, what to do if the fetus dies, becomes disabled, or the parents no longer want children, and the safety and accessibility of this expensive procedure.

In the 1960s the development of the birth-control pill raised ethical issues. In 1973 the Supreme Court of the United States legalized abortion with its landmark Roe v. Wade decision. Controversy surrounding the ruling has kept abortion a volatile political and ethical issue into the 1990s. In the 1980s French researchers developed RU-486, a drug that can induce abortion without invasive procedures. RU-486 has contributed to the heated debate about the morality of abortion and is still awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.

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