Winners of the ESHG DNA day assays announced this week

From the 118 assays by high-school students received, from 8 countries, the respective national societies of human genetics selected the best three. Then, the best assay in each country was chosen. A panel of members from Education Committee of the ESHG (one from Germany, Turkey, Sweden and Portugal, and 2 from the UK) classified the 8 finalists.

The winners were: 1^st Poland (Dorota Dziewońska); 2^nd Serbia (Dimitrije Cvetković); and 3^rd Italy (Giovanni Luca Maglione). The following places were Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, Belgium and Bosnia, in that order. These results will be posted at the ESHG website.

Of note were the facts that (1) some themes, as gene and cell therapy, were recurrent; (2) high-school students are, in general, very deterministic (perhaps a reflection of the teaching they have and the dominating tone in our society and media); (3) nevertheless, and in no apparent contradiction with the former (which is a matter for reflection), quite a few assays among the finalists showed important humanistic concerns (some included remarks about the need for ethical consideration of the recent advances in human genetics and/or the need for education in ethics of young students).

As an example, I will leave here an extract of the assay by the Portuguese finalist, Ricardo Carragosela, from Esc. Sec. Ferreira Dias, Cacém:

Medicine is going through the era of genetic manipulation, in which gene therapy may well come to be the great miracle. For the first time, devastating diseases, such as cancer and cardiac disease, among many others, might be completely cured. Gene therapy with its promises may come to be the greatest discovery medicine has ever seen. Society wants, however, in all its legitimacy, to make sure that science attains to ethical values. As someone once said, bioethics is “the bridge between science and humankind”; and that bridge must be preserved. Every health professional or scientist should assume the great complexity of the phenomenon of life, accept what we still don’t know and not run the risks of attempting against the dignity of human life, nor of violations to ethics in a plural society. Take for instance the following words: “it is being proclaimed with a tone of triumph that science begins to dominate life; may be one day we arrive at that, but it is certain that life, thus dominated, has no greater value, as it guarantees for the future much less life than that same life once did, dominated, not by science, but by instincts and a few great illusions”.

Having conducted a similar initiative among high-school students in Portugal, for the Programme Ciência Viva, 2000-2002, I cannot help noticing how the issues were now so remarkably similar to those raised then. It is expected that the ESHG and its Education Committee, as well as national human genetics societies and the educators in general, take a good note of that and act accordingly.