ABC9: the two best student prizes

During the last Asian Bioethics Conference, not many of the participants were aware that student presenters were judged for their presentations. The two best student prizes are "BIOETHICS GOES TO SCHOOL: module design for high school students in Indonesia" by Sherly Kurnia Dewi from Atma Jaya Indonesia Catholic University, Indonesia and "Survey Research and Ethics" by Noriko Kataoka from Kumamoto University, Japan.

The abstracts of their presentations follow.

"Bioethics goes to school:
module design for high school students in Indonesia"

Sherly Kurnia Dewi (third year student),
Biotechnology Faculty, Atma Jaya Indonesia Catholic University,
Jalan Jenderal Sudirman 51 Jakarta 12930 Indonesia,
Email: sherly.kurnia@mhs.atmajaya.ac.id

Elizabeth Citra Wening Prasanti (fourth year student),
English Department Faculty of Education, Atma Jaya Indonesia Catholic University,
Jalan Jenderal Sudirman 51 Jakarta 12930 Indonesia,
Email: elizabeth.citra@mhs.atmajaya.ac.id

Abstract

Advancing technology often create dilemma when faced with religion and folk culture. The technology sometimes also can harm the environment. Bioethics is a multidisciplinary knowledge to moderate these problems. Bioethics contains not only biology but also sociology, anthropology, economy, religion, environmental issues, psychology, and philosophy. If someone has studied bioethics for a long time, they can use bioethics to solve problem in a better way, thus it is important for us to study bioethics from an early age. In Indonesia, bioethics is taught in university. In high schools, bioethics is taught in integration with biology. The objective of this module is to teach applied bioethics to high school students. This module has four subjects: basic bioethics, environmental and biodiversity bioethics, design baby experiment issue, and euthanasia. To make the learning exciting, this module contains games, drama, and case study. The design module would be tested to high school students on July.
Keywords: bioethics teaching, high school students

and

"Survey Research and Ethics"

Noriko Kataoka
Kumamoto University
gray_little_man@hotmail.com


Abstract

Faced with evermore advancing medical technologies, bioethicists are asked to provide insights but the difficulty faced by bioethicists is that there is a wide gap between ethics, which tends to appreciate universal values more, as a discipline and the real situation, in which values appear to be in a constant flux. However, values are not so much changing over time but what is changing is the emphasis placed on each value. This presentation suggests incorporating survey research into the discipline of ethics as its method. This will allow for adjusting abstract top-down approaches and concrete bottom-up approaches to formulate effective approaches to current bioethical issues. I will first present results from a survey conducted on attitudes towards end-of-life care in Kumamoto, Japan as an example. Then, I will argue how such attitude survey contributes to the field of ethics as a new method.