Leonard Lopez

Medical professionals are a community of highly educated individuals with a commitment to a core set of ideals and principles. This community provides both technical and ethical socialization. The ideal physician is confident, empathic, forthright, respectful, and thorough. These ideals allow us to define broadly "the excellence" of being a physician. At the core of these ideals is the ability to be empathic. Empathy exhibits itself in attributes of an individual's moral character and also in actions that actualize and support communal life. Empathy, however, can be diminished or even lost and must be nurtured on an ongoing basis. The development of ethical physicians is strongly linked to experiences in the training period. Moral traits are situation-sensitive psychological and behavioral dispositions. The clinical environment of medical training programs can be so intense as to lead to conditions that may actually deprofessionalize trainees. Creating a clinical environment that is ethically nurturing and sustaining is an indispensable component of practicing medicine

Applying technologies into the human body makes a hybrid human/machine: a cyborg. We identified four types of cyborgs in the literature: the original cyborg, enhanced temporarily for space exploration, the science-fiction cyborg, the “Haraway cyborg” used to critic the dualisms and the “everyday cyborg” who became one by necessity, and learns to live with the implanted technologies. We propose in this article a fifth version: the biocyborg. Such a cyborg presents a new kind of hybridity that we named artificial chimerism, it leads to a multi-scale non-Darwinian evolution and the willingness to become a biocyborg is not only driven by necessity but also by the desire to be enhanced and to push the physiological boundaries of the human body. Becoming a biocyborg comes with new vulnerabilities as any embodied technologies but the associated risk is multi-level and also concerns the human species.