• The guidelines for this agreement were set after the Encuentro Bioética 2014: Unión Chile-Palestina conference, organized by the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Institutional Ethics Committee with the purpose of providing a space for reflection on the role of Bioethics in contemporary societies. Through this agreement, our University will collaborate with An-Najah National University for implementing study programs related to this field.

“Education in Bioethics should not start at our age, but when we are children. We have to start educating children so that they become humans.” These were the words of Dr. Walid Basha, head of the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the An-Najah National University (Palestine), who participated in the Encuentro Bioética 2014: Unión Chile-Palestina conference that was held in the University’s Salón de Honor hall on December 04th.

The activity was organized by the Institutional Ethics Committee (CEI, in Spanish) and the Outreach and Engagement unit of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA, in Spanish) and had the purpose of providing a space for reflection on the role of Bioethics in contemporary societies, a discipline that has had a constant development in the past three decades.

According to Dr. Basha, Bioethics in Palestine involves three areas: medicine, medical practice and research on human beings and animals. However, in his country this field does not have associated regulations. Chile, on the other hand, has Law Nº20.584 that governs peoples’ rights and duties with regards to actions related to health care, and Law Nº 20.120 that governs scientific research on human beings and their genomes, among other regulations.

In spite of the differences in the regulatory frameworks of both countries, the Palestinian professor highlighted the significance that Bioethics has gained in his country, pointing out that it is a very important issue to disseminate. “I tell my medicine students that they will be the only ones watching when a patient dies and that he/she will die happy or otherwise,” depending on the role they decide to play. In this sense, Dr. Basha says that “Bioethics teaches human beings to love, and if we are able to love, we can do anything.”

The activity was headed by Dr. María Inés Winkler, the acting Vice President of the CEI. She said that the conference was conceived as an open space for dialogue to learn from leading experts in the field. She reminded the attendees that Universidad de Santiago’s CEI was the first one in being accredited in all the Metropolitan Region. “At our University, all scientific research that involves human beings is certified from an ethical point of view by our committee. However, reviewing research projects is just one of the tasks imposed by our schematic and reflexive concern for research ethics. The academic world, in particular, should be the privileged space to promote reflection, analysis and debate on highly important issues,” Dr. Winkler said.

Gonzalo Díaz, professor at the Department of Philosophy of Universidad de Santiago, also participated in the activity, by giving the presentation “Racismo y paradigma inmunitario” to introduce the Palestinian conflict from a philosophical viewpoint. “Western media prefer the western technology triumphal march scene instead of showing how the Middle East nations and cultures survive,” he said.

Collaboration program

Dr. Basha’s visit to our University allowed establishing the framework for an agreement. On the occasion, the Palestinian Ambassador in Chile, Imad Nabil Jada'a; the Cultural and Commercial Attaché, Basem Nassar; and the Director of the Department of Biology of our University, Dr. Claudio Acuña, were present. The agreement will be ratified soon by the An-Najah National University and Universidad de Santiago de Chile.

This future agreement will enable the formal collaboration between our University and the An-Najah National University to implement, improve and deepen Bioethics study programs, considering that Universidad de Santiago is characterized by having a multidisciplinary knowledge of this matter. The agreement also gives graduate students and researchers of Universidad de Santiago the possibility of traveling to Palestine.

Workshop on Bioethics 

On December 05th, Dr. Basha gave a workshop on Bioethics at the Auditorium of the Faculty of Chemistry and Biology, with the participation of graduate students and researchers of our University.

Dr. Hugo Cárdenas, a member of the CEI, said that those who participated in the workshop, first had the possibility of learning of an ethical and anthropological viewpoint on the conflict between Israel and what is now the State of Palestine, making a distinction between the Jewish world and the State of Israel. “And then, with Dr. Walid Basha’s presentation, for the first time in the country, we were able to learn of the state of development of Bioethics in the most important Palestinian university: the An-Najah National University,” he said.


Translated by Marcela Contreras