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Since 1995 the ‘MiRe’ has developed a research programme to mobilise teams of social science researchers to look into medical and biomedical ethics. It is a matter of widening the approaches practised until now, and then confronting these new expertises with the real world of the actors in the health field. Three stages of work have been launched: on the institutions ‘producing’ such ethics, ethics in daily practice, and ethics in contact with biomedical research. From 1996 to 2001 when the research was carried out, a discussion seminar among the researchers produced stimulating exchanges between the “denouncers” of ethics and those who promote them. The vital points of the programme were based on the approaches taken in medical lawsuits as the demonstrators and regulators of ethics; on the debate between a positivist law and a procedural law; on throwing light on the great diversity in local ethics committees; on queries about the place of patients in the medicine and/or biomedicine worlds; and on the concomitant upheaval in both science and ethics due to the globalisation process. The structuring of a research field is never easy: what is clearly required here is to call together all the disciplines and all the expertises, without however any attitude of hegemony.