Tuesday, 11 April 2017

Three students in Bioethics and Biolaw awarded dissertation prizes

Awards go to: Alice Foglio, Sara Raspatelli and Carla Maria Reale

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Alice Foglio, Sara Raspatelli and Carla Maria Reale received the best dissertation award for their work on bioethics and biolaw, which has been established by the Ethics Committee on Experiments involving human beings of the University of Trento. The awards were presented this morning on the occasion of the interdisciplinary conference “Law, medicine, and technology”, at the Faculty of Law. 

The competition was open to students who graduated from the University of Trento in 2015. The first prize (750 euro) was awarded to Alice Foglio, with a degree in Humanities, for her dissertation “Biodiritto e logica deontica. Tentativi di applicazione per un circolo virtuoso”. (Biolaw and deontic logic. How to apply these concepts in a virtuous circle). The second prize (500 euro) was awarded equally to two Law graduates who wrote dissertations about current topics in the areas of law applied to bioethics: Sara Raspatelli with “Dichiarazioni anticipate sui trattamenti sanitari e dignità della persona: profili civilistici”, and Carla Maria Reale with her dissertation "Corpo e binarismo di genere: ricostruzioni e prospettive evolutive”.

The award presentation ceremony was also the occasion to launch the 2017 edition of the prize for dissertations on bioethics and biolaw topics for students who graduated in 2016 (deadline for applications is 15 May).

The morning session of the conference focused on personalized medicine with a debate between biologists and legal professionals. Silvio Garattini, former head of Istituto Mario Negri in Milan, opened the second session of the conference with an address on the cost of pharmaceutical drugs: a price which is imposed by the market and often prevents patients from receiving treatment. A session on robotics and artificial intelligence took place in the afternoon.

«Dialogue among researchers from different disciplines is not always easy», explained Carlo Casonato, head of the Biolaw project. «Law, for example, is often seen as an obstacle to the progress of medical research and science in general. However, defensive medicine or the decrease in the use of informed consent forms (a signature at the bottom of a page that sometimes people do not even bother to read) demonstrate that there is still a lot to do to improve communication among law, medicine and new technologies». And this is the purpose of the newly founded Biolaw Journal, an open access magazine with an interdisciplinary and open-minded perspective designed to inform and offer a comparative and critical view of regulations in the area of life sciences. In its first three years of life, the Journal grew in terms of audience and circulation in the world of research and in the health sector both in Italy and abroad. That is because it presents articles in Italian and in foreign languages and pays special attention to events both in Italy and in other countries. The number of readers is constantly on the increase and the downloads have increased significantly in the last year».

For more information on the journal and the Biolaw project visit: www.biodiritto.org

Photo reportage ©RomanoMagrone for UniTrento
From left: Carlo Casonato, Alice Foglio, Sara Raspatelli, Carla Maria Reale and Silvio Garattini