[Tasks, regulations, and functioning of ethics committees].

Our constitutional order provides comprehensive protection of the freedom of scientific research; any interference with this freedom requires justification. With regard to the obligatory involvement of ethics committees in the research process, this justification is based on a careful balancing of scientific freedom on one hand and the legal interests of study participants, such as the protection of life, health, and self-determination, on the other. How this is achieved, and with what results, is shown below for two areas.

[Clinical assessment and prescriptive regulation].

Although it appears that the methods of medicine cannot be approached from a legal perspective, the law--as a code of conduct--establishes requirements for the effectiveness of treatment and standards for decision-making in healthcare. Central provisions of the relevant law relate to extraordinarily vague legal concepts, taking recourse to knowledge based on experience scattered across the profession. However, the sometimes explosive dissemination of new--heterogeneous or specific--knowledge and an increasing specialisation of treatment approaches very much relativise the importance of medical experience.