We are back from the International Bologna Consensus Assembly on Telemedicine "Ratio Ethica et Ratio Technica: Concerting Governance, Research and Innovation for One Health" promoted by the Italian Society of Telemedicine, our partners in ISOMERISM... and it took us 72 hours to digest everything that happened, to mentally replay all the conversations...
We were clearly deeply invested in the event from its design, so we admit a bias to the statement we are going to share, and it's left to the reader to decide to trust us or to believe we are offering a hyperbole: this event will be remembered as a pivotal moment by the Italian medical community, as the dawn of a new European movement to bring together technical and ethical reasoning by parties of civil society that much can and should contribute to the trajectory of our citizens and fellow humans' experiences in a future never more uncertain than it looks today.
We were at the meeting representing several initiatives... in this space today we won't repeat what has already been eloquently told about our contribution, and thus we invite you to read the reports by:
We will instead share with you what was especially meaningful, beyond expectations. In the context of an event of great pedagogical value, like few in recent years, where speakers and audience interacted as peers, often sharing objecting views and coming out of the room with new ideas, as syntheses beyond the sums of the original contributions, we lived deeply touching moments: the lecture about the Dignitas Curae by Don Mauro Cozzoli and Massimo Massetti, the update on the Charter of Trieste 2 years after its launch (you might remember the event by SCImPULSE last year), the "interassociative panel discussion: the basis for an agreement based on values" that produced a mission statement guiding and harmonizing the action of the undersigning scientific societies and stakeholders (our President Dr Marco Manca will act as external auditor together with Dott. Carlo Maria Petrini)...
However, the most touching moment for the audience has been the interruption of the works by the President of the Italian Society of Telemedicine Prof. Antonio V. Gaddi, and our President Dr Marco Manca, to honour the memory of the late Prof Alma Dal Co (see the obituary Nature ecology&evolution dedicated her). It's difficult to put in words what a loss her too-early-departure has been for everyone... her research about emergence in community dynamics and "holobionts" has contributed so much to so many domains we are invested in (permaculture and ecosystems design, network biology, agent based simulations of complex systems, ...). As announced by our President, SCImPULSE Foundation will work towards activating a funnel of mentoring and career support mechanisms to honour Alma's memory, and to promote the continuation of her work.
Our President reminded the audience again about Alma's work when commenting Professor Marcello Barbieri's lecture about code biology, closing the scientific activities of the conference, highlighting how her work helped clarifying the biological sostrate of new codes' emergence in communities. He also drew a parallel between the epistemological efforts of code biology in lifesciences, and constructor theory in theoretical physics.
Alberto Cottica mentioned Dr Marco Manca's work on non-ergodicity in clinical medicine since 2004, which we find to be a very nice sign of the continued relevance and impact of our research programs, and a testimony of the strong collaborations we nurture with our partners and stakeholders. Dr Manca and Mr Cottica's proposal of work about leveraging digital ethnography and markovian simulations to study how to translate RCTs and observational studies into actionable clinical knowledge (and the pitfalls thereof) attracted much attention, and a well documented proposal of work will soon be shared.
Worth mentioning is also the announcement that the Italian Society of Telemedicine has launched an Italian journal, and that a European one will be launched in partnership with SCImPULSE Foundation and a high profile publisher, in the second half of 2023
...we might be forgetting something, but believe our words when we say it's been an almost overwhelming experience, both emotionally, and in stretching our cultural comfort zone.
We want to close this post by thanking everyone who made this meeting possible: our friends and stakeholders from ISOMERISM and BioDynaMo, the organizing committee, ...and a special mention goes to Eugenio Luciani and Francesca Guidi who have been the watchful maintainers of the machine that worked for months to produced this intense and smooth meeting that will remain in our hearts.
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