Saturday, April 26, 2008

My Personal Blog

Click here for my personal weblog at wordpress.com. This blog contains posts mostly on Buddhism.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Ethical Issues in Compulsory Licensing of Patented Medicines

Then on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 I went to Khon Kaen University to give a talk on "Ethical Issues on Compulsory Licensing." This was a panel which I shared with Dr. Siriwat Thiptaradol and Dr. Vitaya Kulsomboon. Dr. Siriwat is a high ranking official at the Ministry of Public Health and Dr. Vitaya is a professor of pharmacy at Chulalongkorn University.

Workshop on Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights

This week is a very hectic one for me. I went to Manila from Sunday to Tuesday (April 20 to 22) to give two talks in the Training Workshop on the Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights. It was held at the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy at University of the Philippines, Diliman. The workshop was held to promote the Declaration, which was recently announced by UNESCO and adopted by its member states.

The first talk that I gave was on "Human Dignity and Human Rights," which was an important topic in the Declaration. Basically it says that human dignity and human rights should always be respected. This is done in the context of health care and life sciences, which are the main concern of bioethics. Then on Tuesday I gave another talk on "Human Vulnerability and Protection of Personal Integrity."

For more information about the workshop, contact Prof. Leonardo de Castro, University of the Philippines, Diliman.

Workshop on ICTs and Development

The international workshop on "ICTs and Development: Experiences from Asia" has just been completed. The workshop was organized by T. T. Sreekumar and Milagros Rivera of the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore. Around 15 leading scholars from Asia attended, including V. V. Krishna from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. He is the editor of the journal "Science, Technology and Society," which is a leading journal for science and society in Asia.

Yesterday I presented a paper on "Web 2.0 and Social Networking Websites: Challenges and Potentials for Development in the Thai Context." The idea of the paper was to look at the new phenomenon of web 2.0 where user generated content is emphasized and assessed their potential roles for development as well as the obstacles and challenges. Other papers dealed with the impact and the roles of ICT's in Asian society in one way or another. For example, Anke Schwittay from UC at Berkeley talked about the current project run by Hewlett-Packard at Kuppam, India. Gopalan Ravindran talked about mobile phones and moral panics in India.

There were several others. My impression was that this is an important step toward a fuller understanding of the complex roles that information and communication technologies are having in Asia. Asia is a huge continent and there is a lot of diversity. As a result, a paper dealing with one region in the continent could be widely different from another that deals with another region. The methodologies and the home disciplines of the presenters were different also. While most presenters are communication scholars and theoriests of some kind, V. V. Krishna himself is a scholar in science, technology and society; I myself am a philosopher. This is why the workshop is such a dynamic place.