When asked why physicians, engineers, and lawyers have such different points of view, I respond that physicians fix people, engineers fix things, and lawyers fix problems. Most everyone likes people and things, but no one likes problems. The tension between technological development and the law arises because technologists are constantly creating problems that lawyers are called upon, but are quite unprepared to fix. Unlike the role of physicians and engineers, the role of lawyers differs from country to country, depending on the philosophical principles upon which the country's legal system is based. In the United States the role of the law, and consequently of lawyers, is to safeguard individual freedoms and societal rights.
Technology provides objects, law maintains an environment, each for human well-being.
Clashes between jurists and technologists often arise, not because law and technology are at odds, but because technological development is for the masses whereas the law must also deal with members of society as individuals. Centralizing technologies of large scale may be useful to the engineer, but the enormous administrative bureaucracies they spawn inevitably pose serious problems for the individual freedoms the U.S. legal system espouses. An example of the importance of social responsibility in biomedical engineering occurred recently during the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Hearings about anesthesia machine failures. The Hearings were held to investigate unreported incidents involving patients who died while using Puritan-Bennett's Foregger anesthesIa machines. Only after FDA issued a Notice of Adverse Findings citing the firm for inadequate handling of complaint files under the requirements of Good Manufacturing Practices regulations, did the firm provide FDA with access to the 28 lawsuits.