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The ethics of valuing bios in all its forms and shapes has been an essential part of great and successful cultures from the millennia-old Vedic tradition of `tattvamasi'- this is also you: this plant, this animal, this microbe, this ecosystem - to the simple hands-on call of Jesus `love your neighbor'. But as a term bioethics has only been coined 90 years ago by Fritz Jahr, an educator and pastor in Halle in his Bioethical Imperative `Respect every Living Being as an end in itself and treat it, if possible, as such'.

Biotopes and Bioethics are highly complex and adaptable systems of Bios. Individual bios is terminal, but the stream of Bios goes on. Basic properties of Bios such as communication and cooperation, competence and competition, contemplation and calculation, compassion and cultivation come in different shades of light and dark in individuals and species, in history and ecology. Hans-Martin Sass discusses the territories of Bios and Bioethics, based on his involvement in decades of consulting in academia, business and politics. Special attention is given to the vision and role of Bioethics in research and training, in religious and cultural traditions, and in the survival, happiness, and health of corporate, social and political bodies.