The word genocide is relatively new, even though the act of genocide is not. Yet in part because of its twentieth-century origins, genocide is often associated with the use of modern science and technology. The extent to which this is the case is one of the contentious ethical issues associated with the term.

Origins and Controversies

Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin introduced the term genocide in 1944 to describe the widespread killing of civilians that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. He created the term as an amalgam of the Greek genos, meaning race or kind, and the Latin based suffix -cide, indicating killing (Smith 2002, Hinton 2002). At the time genocide was not a distinct crime, but Lemkin lobbied strongly to get it recognized as such.

The result was the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which 136 countries have ratified. In...