The College of Medicine promotes research at the 8th Health Sciences Forum

^{In addition to presenting research presented by undergraduate and graduate students, there was a presence of researchers from different countries who shared their specialization topics with the student community.}

Within the framework of the 8th Health Sciences Research Forum, UPAEP welcomed Dr. Rafael Vicuña, Research Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, who discussed life from a scientific perspective from his career in biology and microbiology.

In this regard, Dr. Rafael Vicuña highlighted that the importance of this question stems from new research being conducted in many fields, from life in the universe, artificial life, and the origin of life on Earth. With the aim of achieving greater knowledge regarding the matters that are most important to us and the world. He said: “If we do not know what life is, we do not quite know what we are.”

He also pointed out the inadequacy of the scientific method in understanding the entire phenomenon of life, and said that “life is more than just a complex chemical system,” referring to the various definitions that biologists and chemists have tried to provide to understand the concept of life. life. In this sense, he pointed out that philosophy can be used to work from the boundaries of science.

“These frontiers refer to phenomena such as viruses, spores, frozen cells, and dormant seeds, for example. These frontier cases are so called because they challenge all the knowledge we have about life, both in its extent and in its properties. In such cases, scientists come up with arguments that That life is no different from inert matter, and they treat life as a simple idea.

He noted that given these definitions that are convenient for scientists, there are those who oppose this simplicity of thinking and seek to push scientific practice to search for better theories that can explain the mysterious phenomenon that is life, and these are theories that seek to provide basic principles to be able to do so. To call Alive Something, for example, said by Claude Morang, who asserts that life can be reduced to three aspects: the first is that what is called life has a complex molecular structure, that it carries out specific chemical reactions and that it reproduces. On the other hand, the idea is a concept Live It is a system that performs four processes: energy contraction, homeostasis, and self-catalysis, and it is capable of learning.

But he highlighted that there is a problem that we notice later in the research, which is related to the cognitive nature of the research, which usually appears in two ways: the first is through reductionism, where life is studied through its parts and not through its parts. As a whole, examining with a magnifying glass the processes that make up the life of an organism. He said: “This type of research is very useful for the exact sciences. It helps us know the things that others are allowed to do, but it does not give us all the information to understand life.” On the other hand, the cognitive system for studying life is a systematic study, which represents the opposite of reductionism, as it seeks to study the life of an organism during its life, and to study the entity to reach its foundations.

Finally, he said, despite all this thinking, all of this still leaves us with a fair number of questions. Some of these questions are: Why does life reproduce? How does life originate? What makes a cell alive? What is the motivation behind life? Philosophers and scientists have asked answers to these questions, and although the answer provided by Hott makes scientists uncomfortable, it is It ventures into a broader dimension than what laboratories can offer us. Haut says that life “involves the pursuit of purpose.” And that sometimes, achieving this goal does not require awareness.

At the opening ceremony, there was the presence of Dr. Mariano Sánchez Cuevas, Vice Rector Academic of UPAEP; Dr. José Manuel Madrazo Cabo, Dean of Medical Sciences; Dr. Laura Contreras-Mioni, Dean of Life and Health Sciences and Mtra. Joana Olmos Lopez, Director of Research, UPAEP.

In his speech, Dr. Madrazo Capo welcomed the teachers, administrators and students, highlighting that this forum is a space to showcase the research work carried out by the students in cooperation with the teachers, and for that he thanked Dr. Robles and Dr. Virginia Cedeño. To enhance these educational activities for basic and epidemiological research.

Finally, Dr. Mariano Sanchez Cuevas opened the forum and thanked the research forum for the invitation and the organizers for promoting this type of activity.