President

Effectively, this document could have been a good opportunity to recall
attention to the fact that CO towards experimental practices of bioethical
relevance is a value of the outmost importance that must be rigorously
protected and that must not be confined to spheres that are relevant, but
restricted, like animalism. In the plenary meeting of the 18 th of December 2009 I
pressed the Committee to include in the document some reflections, although
quick, along these lines, but I was left pretty much isolated (something that
obviously I don’t mind at all, seen as, with regards to moral issues, the opinion
of the majority is only a fact, certainly not an argument). This fact however,
seemed pretty curious, seen as I did not propose to cut even a line from the
text, but to simply integrate it. We know that experimentation on man is
regulated by directives that are much more defensive and binding than animal
testing, but we have reason to believe that, at least in some cases, there are
experimental practices (e.g. on newborns, mentally ill patients, extremely
elderly subjects) able to raise relevant ethical dilemmas on experimenters,
dilemmas that deserve attention and are certainly similar to those that have
been taken seriously in Law n° 413/1993.
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