The course explained how all the different areas of DREAM (the healthcare centre, the laboratory, the pharmacy) are governed by the ethics that are the result of the Community of Sant’Egidio’s way of life. DREAM’s staff all work with this same careful, ethical and scientific approach, as instructed by the programme that Sant’Egido has developed.

As Dr Susanna Ceffa said at the end of the course “…was also an opportunity to look again at the history of the DREAM programme (Dr Morozzo’s book),  and to discover the ethical dilemmas that we have faced since the beginning”.

Studying ethics on a training course was something new for everyone and this made it possible to highlight that, as Dr Noorjehan Abdul Majid, the clinical director of the DREAM programme said, “We already naturally put ethical codes into practice, but today we have understood their theoretical complexity and universal guidelines”.

The course was held by Dr Isabel Hereza, who has a specialisation in pharmacology and quality management, a prestigious curriculum in business management. She is a member of ethics committees and of the Community of Sant’Egidio in Barcelona, and collaborates with the DREAM programme as a volunteer, in particular by supporting the molecular biology laboratories with the ISO 15189 standard accreditation process.

Starting from the history of ethics, the course presented the ethical issues and basic principles of bioethics proposed by Beaucham and Childress in 1979: Autonomy, Charity, No maleficence – “Primum non nuocere” and Justice.

The golden rule of ethics is present in all religions: “do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you”.

This universally recognised principle suggest that there may be a correlation between ethics and innate aspects of human nature.