Within the past fifty years, humanity has come a long way in the fields of science and medicine. A lot of far advanced scientific discoveries have been made thanks to which people are enjoying better health as many diseases have either disappeared or become easily curable. The progress has been achieved in both areas of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. Naturally, people are now happy to live in a world where ferocious attacks of epidemics have been successfully warded off, and where new sophisticated approaches to curing physical ailments have been applied. This has not only saved many lives, but also increased people's lifespan in most developed and many developing countries. Furthermore, the spectacular developments in the field of genetic engineering have raised hopes for unprecedented treatments of what were considered incurable diseases before.

Now, if all this is the bright side of the matter, there has to be a dark side in the form of certain negative aspects when such discoveries are marred by abuse. One is prepared to live with a reasonable proportion of negativeness if it is scientifically inevitable as a natural concomitant and morally acceptable as a necessary price. But negative aspects are totally objectionable when they constitute a serious threat to man's very existence and an obvious deviation from proper scientific methods, especially if the deviation takes place in the application of scientific theories for the purpose of gaining undeserved fame or making unlawful money. Such immoral practices are on the rise now and threaten to reduce people to lab rats without any appropriate rules to govern scientific experimentation. In certain cases, man has come to be looked upon as a storehouse of human spare parts: kidneys, livers, hearts, etc. Deviant application of genetic engineering theories has even gone so far as to attempt to clone man and toy with human life itself. The world is utterly dismayed to see science, which should be a source of power and happiness, turn into a nightmarish source of grief and misery.

Medicine is one of few sciences that arouse much interest from a moral point of view: people always question the morality of every medical practice and every application of medical discoveries. This may be ascribed to the fact that medicine is closely related to the well-being of man, God's most honoured creatures on earth. Thus interest in the morality of medical practice has been significantly apparent in all civilizations including the Mesopotamian, the Ancient Egyptian, the Greek, and the Islamic.

The world woke up to the dreary reality: something had to be done about those atrocities. "The Nuremberg Document" was issued in 1947 specifying a code of ethics that had to be adhered to when conducting research on man.

This was followed by "The Helsinki Declaration" issued by the International Medical Union in 1964. It was revised several times in 1975, 1983, 1989, 1996, and 2000.

Then there was the "Islamic Constitution of Medical Ethics" issued by the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences (IOMS) in 1982.

In almost every issue of scientific and medical magazines now there are reports of such immoral practices especially those relating to trying some new pharmaceutical products on the citizens of poor countries before they are officially approved for human consumption in developed countries.

In view of the blatant violation of human rights in the developing countries mostly populated by Muslims, the IOMS has decided to issue the "Islamic Code of Medical and Health Ethics".