The objective of the seminar is to offer a meeting point between those who develop advances in the genetic engineering field and those who try to offer a legal response, a regulatory framework to try to regulate these new situations, their challenges and questions, against them, the legal culture show even more its deficit of autism, its lack of knowledge of reality and about everything science –and “other sciences”- teaches us about reality.

Besides, there is another concern to address in this seminar. The importance of politics is undeniable, in the genuine meaning of the term, of the debate of some aspects that biotechnological improvements present. Thus, we find ourselves facing a specific context of an old debate, about relationships between the scientist and the politician that probably requires something more than the referral to Weber approaches. Especially because in this debate, in our country (and in others: you just have to see the cases happened in US, France, Italy or England) it is introducing an alternative that, according to a lot of us, implies a distortion of the minimum frame of legitimacy –about pluralism and freedom: from scientific freedom to ideological freedom through ethics. We are referring to a certain attitude of “ethical guardianship” that pretends impose itself above these advances and its normative regulation and that, in a few cases hides a restrictive  and pseudo-confessional vision, due to the strong presence and pressure of catholic church and fundamentalist groups.

Through four panels in which participate academics of different legal, medical and from Biology specialities, but also professionals of Law along with experts of National Commissions of Assisted Reproduction and Ethics. They will review questions such as the debate about mother cells and the usage of frozen embryos, cloning, the selection or election of gender and the criteria of informed consent, with the common purpose of contributing that students of the Universitat de València, and in particular in the social sciences campus, they can approach to an accessible and rigorous analysis, and external to apologetic purposes at the same time.

The seminar concludes with a session dedicated to the formulation of the approach of legitimacy that, in a plural democracy –secular, of course- can be acceptable in this field of impact of biotechnologies.

Aula Magna of the Faculty of Medicine and Odontology. Blasco Ibañez, 15 – 46010 Valencia