Definition of bioethics (history, aims, methods, tools), biological science and research, medical humanities, applied ethics, history of medicine and of technologies. Truth telling. Privacy and confidentiality (bio-banks). Euthanasia and over-treatment. Drug experimentation, codes of ethics and ethics committees. Informed consent. Abortion and status of embryo. Assisted procreation. Cloning and stem cells. Justice and re-sources allocation. Organ transplantation. Definition of death and brain death. Islamic and Jewish patients. Communication inside the staff. Ethics, literature and cinema. Vaccines and public health issues. Burn out in biological personnel: ethics and psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Genetic testing and screening. Nursing and ethics at the chair-side. Ethics consultation. Animal rights. Introductory elements of history-of-biotechnology.
Vis a vis lessons/lectures are going to deal with some of these topics and to show the proper learning methodology. Individual ways of further studying and investigating in ethics and history are to be taught and tested in the classroom.
History of medicine/biotechnology:
The links and events through which the doctrines of healthy and sick man have passed: the profound changes that have emerged over time. The main stages of the biological sciences, from the ancient philosophy of nature to the scientific revolution of the modern world. The Galilean method and the use of optical magnification. The progress of knowledge of the human body and physiology; the blood flow. Ancient therapeutic methods (blood-letting) and the modern concepts of blood, intended as replacement therapy and medicine. Transfusion and the technical-scientific evolution of methodologies for collecting, storing and transporting blood components. The experimental method and the first attempts at mechanical interpretation of vital phenomena (iatromechanics and iatrochemistry); the controversies around the theory of spontaneous generation. The vaccines. The organ and cell pathology. The new nineteenth-century scientific dimension: the "birth of the clinic" and the revolution of hospitals, the new safety of surgery, the identification of infectious agents. The conversation between the clinic and the laboratory. An example of biomedical research in the experience of some Italian scientists. The victorious paths of the twentieth century: new knowledge of the biological mechanisms of protection from diseases, the effective results of prevention and therapies, the discovery of antibiotics and to organ transplants. The introduction of technologies that have dominated the clinical context. An insight at the new century, which draws from the frontiers of immunology, molecular biology and bioengineering, with an acute sensitivity for the dimensions of biotechnology, also in the face of certain persistent uncertainties in medicine.