STUDIA UBB. PHILOSOPHIA, LVI, 2, 2011 PRINCIPLISM VERSUS UTILITARIANISM IN TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE ETHICS MIRCEA LEABU * ABSTRACT. Translational medicine is a rather new research area, as it was mentioned for the first time in 1996, in the PubMed publication index, while bearing as a motto “From bench to bedside”. Its complexity and novelty manage to raise a series of problems, in both medical and bioethical terms. The intricacy of translational medicine resides in the implication of several related research areas, such as tissue engineering, gene therapy, cell therapy, regenerative medicine, molecular diagnosis etc, all of them aiming to orientate current biomedical knowledge toward new effective drugs and medical approaches, while the increase of patients’ beneficence is closely looked upon. The promises of several research areas in translational medicine draw certain pressures upon biomedical studies and researchers, pressures made by research policy makers, politicians, patients, entrepreneurs, and also by the civil society and which bring several ethical challenges to all the above-mentioned stakeholders. Therefore, making good ethical decisions is mandatory. In this paper, I wish to discuss translational medicine ethics from the perspective of principlism and utilitarianism and also suggest rationales for considering the two theories on bioethics as complementary rather than conflicting. A parallel shall be drawn between the four principles of bioethics (acknowledged either by the Anglo-American or by the European principlism) and utilitarian bioethics, which are considered mere tools serving the same purpose: patients’ welfare. Keywords: bioethics, translational medicine, principlism, utilitarianism, ethical decision-making. Introduction I shall begin my article with a truism, for which I kindly ask the readers not to judge my approach too harshly. Throughout our entire life, existence gravitates toward three verbs. The first one is the verb to be and it begins its action before we can even become conscious of what is happening to us, which is our moment of birth (and, who knows, maybe even earlier). The second one is the verb to have, and it gradually insinuates itself into our lives, as we realize that to be depends on the possession of resources, or so it does in physiological terms mainly. Finally, we have the verb to do, and the following reflections try to address the interrelations between this last verb and the other two, in terms of ethical and deontological approaches. * Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy & Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology, “Victor Babes” National Institute of Pathology, Bucharest, Romania