The combined doctorate programme in Biolaw: Bioethics, Health, and Human Rights fits into the field of research into Biolaw and seeks to cover the training vacuum that exists in Doctoral Studies at international level in an integrated and multidisciplinary manner.
Biolaw arises in the context of the rapid advances experienced by science since the end of the 20th century. Human life has become the axis of research and has reached such levels of intervention in the constituting entity of the person and in the technification of the human environment, that the repercussions of it at society level cannot be compared to any other conquest in modern science.
Genetics, medicine, and new technologies have crossed the frontiers of laboratories and technological research centres to penetrate into the daily life of the person and question society as a whole. The magnitude of the facts poses serious dilemmas regarding the future of human existence, dignity in life and the legacy for future generations. It has become essential to ask oneself if, in the face of the growing power of science intervening in human life, all that is technically possible is ethically acceptable and, if so, within what legal limits.
Numerous examples illustrate the transcendency of the new challenges of this millennium and which have fostered the emergence of Biolaw. This is the case of the intervention in the origin of life, the control and technification of death, the value of the principle of personal autonomy, the discoveries of genetic engineering, the advances in matters of health and the influence of technology, the new frontiers on the right to intimacy, the limits to the computerised control of personal information, the manipulation of plants and animals, the respect for the cultural and multicultural identity or the need for the protection of dignity in parallel with the respect for Human Rights. Likewise, the scientific development achieved by our global society generates consequences for the environment of inter-territorial and inter-temporal dimensions that compromise human rights, and which exceed the coordinates of pre-existing disciplines. The legal problems of climate change must be urgently addressed in order to offer appropriate responses to the alerts of science and to offer an adequate legal framework for the defence of the rights of future generations.
This doctorate programme seeks to be at the cutting edge in the study, analysis, processing and formulation of rigorous proposals in the light of the new challenges posed by the 21st century and thereby provide society with fair solutions with a profound ethical content, under the prism of the contrasted reality of biomedical, biotechnological, and environmental sciences.
The starting point for this covers two broad topic areas of work which are neither exclusive nor excluding:
- Human Rights and their formulation from the perspective of biolaw in the different sectors in which there may be risks of violating human dignity. The incidence of the ethical reflection and treating the multicultural reality. Study of the ethic substrate of environmental law that incorporates the temporal dimension of the right to enjoy an adequate environment, bearing in mind the inescapable connection between environmental quality and quality of life as part of people’s health and the rights of future generations to enjoy biodiversity.
- Health as the axis on which biolaw is articulated in the clinical relationship. Bioethical dilemmas that that poses. Biolaw and biomedicine. Scientific and technological advances and their applications to the area of human health. The incidence of technology in the health sector (e-health, processing health and genetic data, robotics and artificial intelligence applied to the health sector) and in general, in the human being (neurotechnology, genetic manipulation …).
Aware of the need to systematically approach the study of the very different questions in which Biolaw is implicated, the “Centre for Studies in Biolaw, Ethics and Health at the University of Murcia”, has driven the creation of the present doctorate programme. These studies involve a particularly notable interdisciplinary dimension so other disciplines, other universities and other countries participate in the programme.
