Welcome to the Official page of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic

Mister Speaker,
Members of the Government,
Professors Daniel Serrão, Jorge Biscaia, Walter Osswald and Luis Archer,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Outstanding within the recognition of the many and distinguished merits of the individualities to whom we are paying tribute today, is, undoubtedly, their pioneering spirit. To be a pioneer is to stride ahead, open up the pathways, clear the horizons.

And to be a pioneer of Bioethics in Portugal means the promotion of a scientific culture within the spirit of the democratization of science, together with speculation regarding the values which must guide scientific and technological progress for the benefit of humanity.

As ethics applied to life, Bioethics presumes a connection between scientific knowledge and ethical consideration.

Today, such as yesterday, Bioethics keeps faith with its original purpose, stressing that it is only in the conjunction between science and ethics that knowledge progresses and that the human being is dignified. Thus, those that feared that the surge of ethics applied to life would represent a blockage to scientific progress should rest undeceived.

The men of science to whom we are paying tribute today, in an exemplary posture of intellectual humility and humanist spirit, recognized the need for ethical thought as a factor not just for the progress of knowledge but also for human development.

Bioethics is confirmed more than ever as a factor of development, whilst accompanying biotechnological progress, whilst considering its social and human implications and whilst guaranteeing that the new knowledge and the new powers contribute towards the improvement of Man’s living conditions.

Only thus can it be justified that bioethics has spread to the different areas of life – in biomedical, animal and environmental levels – and that it has been expanded to all the continents, thus becoming global.

The work on bioethics, ever more demanding, has today, in Portugal, a relevant body of academicians and professional people, with prestigious institutions, with specialized courses and national and international fields of investigation, as well as numerous published papers.

All that has been and is currently being carried out commenced and was impelled by the direct intervention of the individualities to whom we are paying tribute today, and who highly merit being termed as pioneers: Daniel Serrão, Jorge Biscaia, Walter Osswald, to whom we are awarding the Grand Cross of the Order of Sant’Iago da Espada, and Luís Archer, who had already been awarded the same decoration.

Daniel Serrão, in the course of his teaching activity, as Professor in the Faculty of Medicine of Porto University, held relevant national positions in the fields of health and research applied to health, such as the presidency of the Supreme Council of Science and Technology, the presidency of the Commission for the Development of Research in Health Care, of the Council for Reflection on Health, and the vice presidency of the National Oncology Council.

It was in this context of deep involvement in issues relative to medical science that he introduced the study of bioethics in Porto University, and was appointed to many prestigious positions in several world bodies dedicated to the ethics of the science of life. In Portugal, his leading presence in all the mandates of the National Council on Ethics is remarkable.

Jorge Biscaia, as a paediatrician, exercised throughout his professional life a predominant action in the care of the youngest, and was a forerunner in the attention given to the problems of mother-child relationship, detected and treated during pregnancy.

In this field, he held the position of Director of the Neonatology Department of Bissaya Barreto Maternity Hospital, where he set up and developed the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and also created the Precocious Intervention Mother-Child Relations Unit.

He mustered relevant Portuguese individualities, in several academic, scientific and professional fields, to set up the first Portuguese institution dedicated to Bioethics.

Walter Osswald developed his scientific and professional activity mainly in the field of pharmacology, and held the position of Director of the Institute of Pharmacology and Therapeutics of the Porto Faculty of Medicine, the most important and internationally renowned Pharmacological research school in Portugal, and was also elected president of the Portuguese Society of Pharmacology.

His interest and his strife in the field of Bioethics, to which he would later become exclusively dedicated, were already manifest when he presided at the National Committee for the Humanization and Quality of Health Services and to the European Union Committee for the Protection of the Embryo and the Foetus.

Later he created the Bioethics Research Office. Today, as a testimony of his activity in this field, he heads the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics which, with his staff, he recently moved to Portugal.

Luís Archer, who joins the individualities we distinguished today, a biologist and a philosopher, was specially noted in the field of Genetics. As a University Professor, he created and directed the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics of the Gulbenkian Institute of Science, and coordinated the Research Centre of Human Molecular Genetics, promoting research in molecular genetics in Portugal.

It was from this field of activity that he found the way to bioethics, becoming an active participant in the many international forums in which he represented Portugal, such as the Council of Europe and the European Science Foundation.

He was a member of the group of intellectuals that were the pillars of the National Council of Ethics for the Science of Life, to which he later presided.

These four individualities had the merit of not just introducing bioethics in Portugal, but also to develop it, to structure its future institutionally, and to disseminate it throughout society, beyond the restricted circle of specialists.

Thanks to these four individualities, Bioethics is today a common topic of discussion in Portuguese society, and which now involves the interest of all citizens. Bioethics has thus been converted into a civic ethic, a testimony of our belonging to the Community and to the World, and of the interdependency of life.

To those whom we are paying tribute to today, I address my thanks for your pioneering spirit, for your dedication and for your splendid example of citizenship.