Biomedical Humanities

Recent advances in understanding the molecular bases of diseases, at the level of genetic predisposition as well as of its interaction with individual diversities, lifestyles and environments, are drastically changing our perceptions of diagnosis and therapy.

Given this scientific scenario, innovative foundational and ethical analyses are needed, and these could be provided inside a Biomedical Humanities framework. It is a humanistic approach addressing that chain which finishes with the care of patients in clinical practice and which commences with the basic and translational researches on the molecular roots of diseases, on how to detect them, and on how to cope with them by taking into account individual patients’ genetic makeups, diversities, lifestyles and aspirations.

In particular, the Focus Group on Biomedical Humanities at TUM-IAS worked on how a good Ethical Counseling service could improve patient’s decision-making process whenever diversity issues (dealing with gender, sexuality, aging, culture, socio-economical status, religious beliefs, etc.) are on the stage.

By Ethical Counseling we intend a dialogic activity implementable in the cases in which clinical decisions involve ethical and existential issues. It has two different purposes. On the one hand, by clarifying and investigating patients’ belies and values, it assists them to break through their ethical decisional paralysis in clinical settings and to choose the option more in line with their ethical sensitivity. On the other hand, it trains clinicians to properly examine the ethical and existential problematic situations that their patients are facing, in order to go beyond their commonsensical and intuitive moral understanding and to avoid the dangerous conviction that their own way of thinking is better than patients’ one.

The Focus Group on Biomedical Humanities at TUM-IAS was composed of Giovanni Boniolo, Anna Boyksen Fellow, and of his TUM-host, Mariacarla Gadebush Bondio, Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine, TUM, and Ph.D. student Maria Rosak.

Publications by the Focus Group

2016

  • Boem, F.; Ratti, E.; Andreoletti, M.; Boniolo, G.: Why genes are like lemons. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57, 2016, 88-95 mehr…
  • Boniolo, Giovanni: Public obligation and individual freedom: how to fill the gap? The case of vaccinations. Journal of Public Health Research 5 (2), 2016 mehr…
  • Boniolo, Giovanni; Sanchini, Virginia: Ethical Counselling for Physicians. In: SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Springer International Publishing, 2016 mehr…
  • Giovanni Boniolo and Luisa Lanfrancone: Decomposing Biological Complexity into a Conjunction of Theorems. The Case of the Melanoma Network. Humana Mente 30 (9), 2016, 19-35 mehr…
  • Golubnitschaja, Olga; Baban, Babak; Boniolo, Giovanni; Wang, Wei; Bubnov, Rostyslav; Kapalla, Marko; Krapfenbauer, Kurt; Mozaffari, Mahmood S.; Costigliola, Vincenzo: Medicine in the early twenty-first century: paradigm and anticipation - EPMA position paper 2016. EPMA Journal 7 (1), 2016 mehr…
  • Linkeviciute, Alma; Dierickx, Kris; Sanchini, Virginia; Boniolo, Giovanni: Potential Pitfalls in the Evaluation of Ethics Consultation: The Case of Ethical Counseling. The American Journal of Bioethics 16 (3), 2016, 56-57 mehr…
  • Martin, Thomas G.; Bharat, Tanmay A. M.; Joerger, Andreas C.; Bai, Xiao-chen; Praetorius, Florian; Fersht, Alan R.; Dietz, Hendrik; Scheres, Sjors H. W.: Design of a molecular support for cryo-EM structure determination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (47), 2016, E7456-E7463 mehr…