28 Oct 2010 – Frontiers of Science…

Held at the Matrix Building on Biopolis St, an area completely new to me but had no difficulty finding it… over an hour on the bus from one end of the island to the other end. Sight-seeing on bus 196 is a good way to see all the new changes. And believe me, SIN does change very quickly.

The Irish Graduates Association of SIN/IGAS in conjunction with the A*STAR Post Doc Society hosted an interesting symposium with five excellent speakers last night. Sir David LANE discussed about the pharmaceutical aspects, Edison LIU/Genome, Adeline/Biofuels, Jacob/Infectious diseases, Suzy from Dublin/Nanotechnology. The tag-line Ethical Challenges intrigued me, also being an IGAS member and to meet the SIN Irish new Ambassador Joe HAYES were the reasons to be there but it turned out to be one of the most educational experiences. All the speakers did an impressive job with not being too technical but gave a general outlook of their fields and even I who is considered to be an artsy-fartsy 🙂 understood what they were talking about!

Yesterday evening was quite an eye-opener. Thanks to IGAS president Brian MOONEY and to Minister Conor LENIHAN/Minister for Science Technology & Innovation (Ireland) for their presence. There were no regrets to choose this function to forego the other two musical functions.

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn’t mean that you can’t think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places – Peter Singer