Study provides new data on ‘jumping genes’ linked to cancer, which could pave the way to new treatments and better diagnoses of the disease

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Scientists from the University of Granada and GENYO have discovered a mechanism via which our cells protect themselves against these transposable or mobile genetic elements, known as ‘LINE-1’, which are involved in the development and progression of many types of cancer

The results of this research have recently been published in Nature Communications

Scientists from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology II  of the University of Granada (UGR) and the Pfizer-University of Granada-Andalusian Government Centre for Genomics and Oncological Research (GENYO) have discovered a mechanism via which our cells protect themselves against ‘jumping genes’ or transposable (mobile) genetic elements known as LINE-1 or L1.

These are DNA sequences that have the ability to ‘jump’ from one site to another within our genome. By inserting themselves randomly anywhere in the genome, the ‘jumps’ can cause diseases ranging from haemophilia to muscular dystrophy or cancer. In fact, L1s are known to be mobilized during the development of various types of cancer and may even cause it.

Although this study stems from basic research—research that produces knowledge that provides a better understanding of the biology and genetics of cancer—it could pave the way to an improvement in cancer treatments or to the design of new diagnostic or therapeutic strategies.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules that regulate gene expression and play an important role in the control of cell proliferation (and therefore in preventing the onset of tumours). In this study, which has recently been published in the prestigious Nature Communications, the scientists discovered a previously-unknown role of ‘let-7’ (one of the most important microRNAs in the animal kingdom): maintaining genome integrity by restricting the ‘jumps’ or retrotranspositions made by L1.

DNA: An instruction book

Pablo Tristán, a researcher atGENYO and lead author of this work, explains that “our genome, our DNA, is the instruction book for our body. Within this book, the instructions for making proteins (the molecules that perform most of the functions of cells) are the genes. Yet, despite their importance, genes only occupy 2% of our genome, while half of the remaining 98% is made up of mobile genetic elements—DNA sequences that have the ability to ‘jump’ from one site to another within our genome. Fortunately for us, almost all of them have acquired mutations that prevent them from moving, and there is only one family left capable of making the proteins it needs to jump: the L1 elements”.

The possible role of miRNAs as regulators of the mobile elements, and whether this regulation is important in the development of cancer, are under-studied topics. “We aimed to study whether any of these microRNAs could control L1 retrotranspositions and, therefore, if alterations in microRNA levels (a common feature in cancer) could contribute to the increase in L1 retrotranspositions observed in tumours”, explains Sara Rodríguez Heras, ‘Ramón y Cajal’ Research Fellow at the UGR’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology II, who led the research project from GENYO.

In this study, the researchers demonstrated that lung cancer samples containing new L1 copies, distributed randomly throughout the genome, contain very low levels of the let-7 miRNA, which is known for its role as a tumour suppressor.

More L1 ‘jumps’

Tristán continues: “Next, we used various molecular and cellular biology techniques to demonstrate that, indeed, a reduction in the levels of this microRNA leads to an increase in L1 retrotransposition in cultured cells”. In turn, if the levels of let-7 are increased, the number of copies of L1 that accumulate is reduced.

“Furthermore, using biochemical techniques, we discovered the molecular mechanism by which this occurs, which is basically that let-7 specifically recognises this mobile genetic element and reduces the production of one of the proteins made by L1 that is essential for generating the new insertion”, explains Rodríguez Heras.

In short, the researchers discovered the previously-unknown role of the tumour-suppressing miRNA let-7 family, to maintain the integrity of the genome and protect it from the mutagenic activity of mobile genetic elements.

Bibliography:

Pablo Tristán-Ramos, Alejandro Rubio-Roldan, Guillermo Peris, Laura Sánchez, Suyapa Amador-Cubero, Sebastien Viollet, Gael Cristofari & Sara R. Heras (2020), ‘The tumor suppressor microRNA let-7 inhibits human LINE-1 retrotransposition’, Nature Communications 11, 5712. Online: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19430-4

Sara Rodríguez and Pablo Tristán, researchers from the UGR and GENYO

The research group (photographed before the coronavirus pandemic)

Simplified visual of the results of the study. A miRNA let-7 family (shown in red) is capable of controlling the ‘jumps’ of the mobile genetic element LINE-1 (shown in white) from one site to another within our DNA (shown in black).

Media enquiries:

Sara Rodriguez Heras

‘Ramón y Cajal’ Research Fellow

Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology II, University of Granada

Pfizer-University of Granada-Andalusian Government Centre for Genomics and Oncological Research (GENYO)

Email: sararheras@ugr.es

Scientists find evidence of the oldest gynaecological treatment on record, performed in ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago

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Scientists from the Universities of Granada and Jaén are studying the physical evidence found in the mummified remains of a woman who suffered severe trauma to the pelvis in 1878–1797 BC, linking them to a medical treatment described in various Egyptian medical papyri of the time

During the Qubbet el-Hawa Project, led by the University of Jaén (UJA) in Aswan (Egypt), in which scientists from the University of Granada (UGR) are participating, researchers have found evidence of the oldest gynaecological treatment on record, performed on a woman who lived in Ancient Egypt some 4,000 years ago and died in 1878–1797 BC.

During the 2017 archaeological dig organised in Qubbet el-Hawa, on the western bank of the River Nile, Andalusian researchers found a vertical shaft dug into the rock in tomb QH34, leading to a burial chamber with ten intact skeletons.

Mummification techniques were not very effective at that time, at least at this site in Upper Egypt. However, the individuals buried there generally belonged to the upper classes of society meaning that they would have been given special care. These particular mummies are very well-preserved and are wrapped in thick layers of linen strips, sometimes bearing remnants of dried soft tissue.

“The mummies had grave goods (usually necklaces of different types); in some cases, their faces were covered with cartonnage masks; and they were preserved inside two rectangular sarcophagi, one inside the other. These featured hieroglyphic inscriptions and were typically badly damaged due to termite infestation,” explains Miguel Botella, forensic anthropologist and Emeritus Professor at the UGR, who conducted the analyses.

The last mummy buried

One of the mummies excavated by the team of anthropologists was perhaps the last to be buried in the chamber. It belonged to a woman of high social class, whose name, Sattjeni, has been preserved in the remains of the outer coffin. That name must have been common among the upper classes of the region, perhaps explaining why she was named Sattjeni A.

Between her bandaged legs, in the lower part of the pelvis and beneath the linen wrappings, the researchers found a ceramic bowl with signs of use, containing charred organic remains. The analysis of the skeletal remains was carried out by a team of anthropologists from the UGR (coordinated by Professor Botella) and it confirmed that the woman had survived a serious fracture in her pelvis, perhaps caused by a fall, which must have caused severe pain.

It is highly likely that, to alleviate these pains, the woman was treated with fumigations, as described in medical papyri of the time describing solutions to gynaecological problems.

“The most interesting feature of the discovery made by the researchers from the University of Jaén is not only the documentation of a palliative gynaecological treatment, something that is quite unique in Egyptian archaeology, but also the fact that this type of treatment by fumigation was described in contemporary medical papyri. But, until now, there had been no evidence found to prove that such treatment was actually carried out,” explains the UJA’s Dr. Alejandro Jimenez, an expert in Egyptology and director of the Qubbet el-Hawa Project. This work has now been published by one of the most prestigious academic journals in Egyptology, Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Spracheund Altertumskunde.

The project was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Research, Fundación Gaselec, Fundación Palarq, the Calderón Group, and the Spanish Association of Egyptology.

The mummified remains of Sattjeni A. The mummy was on its side with the legs slightly bent. In front of the head is the polychrome funerary mask

Important damage to the pubis

Right hip fracture with joint alteration

Miguel Botella, Emeritus Professor of the UGR, in tomb QH34 next to the mummy of Sattjeni A

Researchers from the University of Granada in Qubbet el-Hawa (Aswan)

Media enquiries:

Miguel Botella

Department of Legal Medicine, Toxicology and Physical Anthropology, University of Granada

Tel.: +34 958 240710

Email: mbotella@ugr.es

A mathematical model developed at the UGR predicts that the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain will last until March

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A team of researchers from the University of Granada, the University of Lyon (France), and the University of the Western Cape (South Africa) have used a simple epidemiological model to predict that the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain will last until March, with about 55,000 fatalities

A team of researchers from the University of Granada (UGR), the University of Lyon (France), and the University of the Western Cape (South Africa) have used a simple epidemiological model to predict that the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain will last until March 2021, with about 55,000 fatalities.

“In the first wave, an exponential behaviour was observed, with the daily fatality rate increasing very rapidly; in the second wave, the increase is not exponential, it is much less rapid, almost linear, which indicates that it will be a longer wave that will last until March”, explains José Enrique Amaro, Professor at the Department of Atomic, Molecular and Nuclear Physics of the UGR.

His calculations project 50,000 deaths by January 10, setting the peak of the death curve in March, with about 55,000 victims—forecasts that could change depending on any new measures introduced.

“The predictions must be approached with caution because it is impossible to achieve 100% accuracy months in advance”, warns the expert, who updates the data from the second wave in Spain and analyses them with different models.

At the beginning of the pandemic in Spain, Professor Amaro developed a method to analyse the evolution of the coronavirus, using a formula that simplified the SIR model—used by many scientists with proven accuracy—and which he later extended to calculate the daily death rate.

In a joint collaboration with the UGR, Professor Amaro brought together researchers from the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the University of Lyon to examine various epidemiological models used to try to anticipate the effect of the pandemic.

The team modified the SIR statistical model to ascertain how the death rate is likely to evolve, without the need to know the number of infected people—a figure that is much less reliable than the number of deaths.

The results of the research, published in the prestigious journal Applied Mathematical Modeling, indicate that, to determine how the final phase of the pandemic will play out, it is necessary to factor-in the temporal variations in the indices of propagation and interaction attributed to measures such as quarantines, social distancing, or facemasks.

This simplified model was used to study the daily death curve in the most badly-affected European countries during the first wave of the pandemic and has shown that the same trends are repeated, which suggests a universal behaviour of the coronavirus.

Media enquiries:

José Enrique Amaro Soriano

Department of Atomic, Molecular and Nuclear Physics, University of Granada

Tel.: +34 958 240028

Email: amaro@ugr.es

UGR scientists create ‘time crystals’—a new state of matter— using a supercomputer

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Time crystals are a strange phase of matter that emulates a crystalline structure in the fourth dimension, time, rather than in space, and was recently proposed by Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate in Physics, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Scientists from the University of Granada (UGR), Spain, and the University of Tübingen (UT), Germany have discovered a way to create time crystals, a new phase of matter that emulates a crystalline structure in the fourth dimension, time, rather than in space, from rare fluctuations in many-particle physical systems.

Time crystals are a new state of matter recently proposed by Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate in Physics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In time crystals, whose existence was first proposed in 2012, the atoms repeat a pattern through the fourth dimension, time, unlike normal crystals (such as a diamond), whose atoms are arranged in a repetitive spatial structure. Thus, these new time crystals are characterised by an enduring periodic motion in time.

In this study, recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters of the American Physical Society—one of the most prestigious publications in the world in the field of physics—the UGR researchers demonstrate that certain dynamical phase transitions that appear in the fluctuations or rare events of many physical systems spontaneously break time-translation symmetry.

Researchers Rubén Hurtado Gutiérrez and Carlos Pérez Espigares and lecturer Pablo Hurtado, from the UGR’s Department of Electromagnetism and Matter Physics, in collaboration with researcher Federico Carollo of the UT, have proposed a new way to use this natural phenomenon to create time crystals.

To perform the simulations in this study, the scientists used PROTEUS, the supercomputer belonging to the «Carlos I» Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics (iC1) of the UGR. PROTEUS (https://proteus.ugr.es/) is one of the most powerful general scientific calculation supercomputers in Spain, with a calculation capacity of more than 90 TeraFlops, more than 2,300 processing cores, 7.5 Terabytes of RAM, and 380 TeraBytes of data storage.

As Pablo Hurtado explains, the concept of time has challenged physicists and philosophers alike since ancient times. To paraphrase Saint Augustine of Hippo, “What, then is time? If no-one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to he who asks, I do not know.”

“Einstein’s relativity taught us that time is somehow flexible and that it is inextricably linked to space in a whole that we know as SpaceTime. This Einsteinian unification is, however, partial, since time continues to be special in many ways”, observes the UGR researcher. Examples abound: we can move back and forth between any two points in space, yet we cannot visit the past; time has an arrow—pointing toward entropy increase—while space has no such arrow, etc. What’s more, time symmetries also exhibit interesting peculiarities”.    

In their paper, the UGR scientists propose a hitherto unexplored route to building time crystals, based on the recent observation of spontaneous breaking of continuous time-translation symmetry in fluctuations of many-particle systems. These dynamic phase transitions (DPTs) appear in trajectory space when a physical system is conditioned to make a rare (or improbable) fluctuation in certain observables, such as the particle stream.

Using spectral analysis tools, the scientists unequivocally demonstrated the relationship between these DPTs and time crystals. Interestingly, these rare events can be made typical by transforming the microscopic dynamic of the particles, which can be interpreted in terms of the original dynamics supplemented by a smartexternal field. This enables the previously highly improbable temporal crystal behaviour to be exploited in a practical way.

Based on these observations, the researchers proposed a nonequilibrium fluid model that exhibits a time-crystal-like phase transition, breaking time-translation symmetry and displaying rigidity, robust coherent periodic motion, and long-range spatio-temporal order. In this paper, they also discuss how to create these time crystals in the laboratory from colloidal fluids in optical traps and under external packing fields generated with optical tweezers.

“These results are important because, at a fundamental level, they open an unexplored path to better understand time and its symmetries, while, on a practical level, they teach us new ways to create time crystals. This is especially relevant in fields such as metrology, for the design of more precise clocks, or in quantum computing, where time crystals can be used to simulate ground states or design quantum computers that are more resistant to decoherence, with the technological possibilities that this entails,” say the researchers.

Bibliography:

R. Hurtado-Gutiérrez, F. Carollo, C. Pérez-Espigares, and P.I. Hurtado (2020) ‘Building continuous time crystals from rare events’, Physical Review Letters 125, 160601. Online: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.160601. Also available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02733.

Media enquiries:

Pablo I. Hurtado

Department of Electromagnetism and Matter Physics

“Carlos I» Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics

University of Granada

Tel.: +34 958 241000 ext. 20189

Email: phurtado@onsager.ugr.es

Website: http://ic1.ugr.es/phurtado

cientists from the UGR discover that bacteria can travel from one continent to another in atmospheric dust particles acting as ‘launch vehicles’

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Researchers have solved the enigma of the inter-continental transport of microorganisms via iberulites (‘giant’ atmospheric particles potentially inhalable by humans) and atmospheric dust, with the consequent risk of disease transmission that this implies

Researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) have discovered that some microorganisms, such as bacteria, can travel from one continent to another ‘hidden’ in atmospheric dust.

Scientists from the UGR’s Department of Edaphology and Agricultural Chemistry, Department of Applied Physics, and Centre for Scientific Instrumentation have deciphered the enigma of the inter-continental transport of microorganisms via iberulites (‘giant’ atmospheric particles potentially inhalable by humans) and atmospheric dust, with the consequent risk of disease transmission that this implies.

Iberulites are giant polymineralic atmospheric bioaerosols, measuring on average one hundred microns approximately (although they can reach up to 250 µm).  They travel across continents, defying the laws of gravity and transporting live microorganisms (acting rather like a launch vehicle). They were discovered in 2008 by researchers from the Department of Edaphology and Agricultural Chemistry of the UGR and the Andalusian Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training (IFAPA).

NASA made the discovery public on its website in October of that year. But it is not until now that the UGR’s multidisciplinary scientific team has revealed the mechanism by which bacteria are involved in the genesis and formation of atmospheric iberulites.

The researchers analysed atmospheric dust deposits found in the city of Granada, the composition of which is heterogeneous comprising predominantly clay, quartz, and carbonate minerals and, to a lesser degree, iron oxides. In addition to this mineral component, a biological component was found in this dust: bacteria, diatoms, planktonic organisms, and even brochosomes (microscopic granules secreted by insects such as grasshoppers). The dust originated from the Sahara Desert (north-northeast Africa) and local/regional soils. Atmospheric interactions between these two components and clouds produce the iberulites (polymineralic bioaggregates), whose composition has now, for the first time, been studied.

To characterise the iberulites and solve the mystery of their existence and formation, the researchers analysed their mineral composition, elemental composition, size of atmospheric dust, and the air mass origin for this particular region, as well as the atmospheric formation mechanisms involving bacteria. 

They found that, in broad terms, iberulites originate in the troposphere as a result of various hydrodynamic processes that enable interaction to take place between dust grains, microorganisms of that dust that rise from Saharan soils (which act as condensation nuclei), and water-vapour molecules from clouds. The droplet of water formed in these condensation nuclei agglutinates dust particles of different sizes in its interior together with bacteria in suspension.

During the trajectory taken by the droplet through the air, a series of gravitational forces create a coherent structure inside, producing a wall or external covering (micro-laminate or clay rind) while, inside, the mineral particles are arranged in an orderly pattern (the smallest on the outside and the largest at the centre of the iberulite).

Giant aerosols

At the same time, due to hydrodynamic forces, a vortex is created at the north pole of the increasingly complex droplet of water, which is what lends these giant aerosols their characteristic appearance. This is the basic structure of the iberulite, which enables it to react with other atmospheric components, leaving behind a reliable trace of the places through which it has passed.

Alberto Molinero García, a researcher at the Department of Edaphology and Agricultural Chemistry at the UGR and one of the authors of this study, explains: “Bacteria can survive in iberulites because these provide a nutritious medium, a microhabitat rich in nutrients, and they protect the bacteria from ultraviolet radiation. This is demonstrated by the bacterial polymeric exudates that, rather like mucilaginous mucus, act as a ‘glue’ between the mineral particles, preventing their disaggregation and increasing their resistance to fragility in the turbulent phenomena of the atmosphere.” 

This enables the iberulites and microorganisms to travel great inter-continental distances on atmospheric currents such as the Saharan Air Layer (SAL). In atmospheric transport, the iberulite is in contact with a reactive medium—the atmosphere—where interactions take place with the gases naturally present, such as nitrogen and sulphur compounds.

A worldwide phenomenon

The UGR researcher points out that iberulites are not exclusive to this region of Spain: they may exist throughout the world, primarily in those regions where dust is carried in from desert regions.

“They have been found in Saudi Arabia, Volgograd (Russia), and possibly in the far-eastern part of China, Japan, Korea, and also in the US,” says Molinero. The new aerosols identified in Granada derive from the Sahara, which is a powerful emitter of atmospheric dust (it is estimated that the Sahara sends between 400 and 700 million tons of dust around the world per year).  

This dust, together with the iberulites and the bacteria incorporated by the different atmospheric currents, can reach as far as the Amazon, the Caribbean, or the Himalayas. However, the dust coming into the Mediterranean is characterised by having followed a specific and well-known atmospheric trajectory.

Using all the data they have gathered, the UGR scientists will model the inhalation of the microscopic particles smaller than 10 microns (PM10) of which iberulites consist, as well as their penetration into the respiratory tract and the destination of the bacteria that are transported.

Bibliography:

Párraga, J., Martín-García, J. M., Delgado, G., Molinero-García, A., Cervera-Mata, A., Guerra, I., Fernández-González, M.V., Martín-Rodríguez, F.J., Lyamani, H., Casquero-Vera, J.A., Valenzuela, A., Olmo, F.J. and Delgado, R. (2021). ‘Intrusions of dust and iberulites in Granada basin (Southern Iberian Peninsula): Genesis and formation of atmospheric iberulites, Atmospheric Research, 105260.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2020.105260

Figure 1. Sequence of iberulite formation in the atmosphere with bacterial involvement (left) and the appearance of an iberulite under electron microscopy (right). Figure courtesy of the journal Atmospheric Research, 248, 15 January 2021, 105260. 

Figure 2. Presence of bacteria and products of their activity (SEM and HRTEM images). a) Presence of a chain of bacteria with filament (F) in the upper horizon of a soil close to the sampling area; b) Iberulite with unknown biological specimen attached to it (represented by rectangle); c) detail of b), colonisation of previous biological specimen by nanobacteria (B); d) HRTEM image of intact microbial cells (B) embedded in the clay matrix of a polished section of an unstained iberulite; e) aggregation of mineral particles in a sample of atmospheric dust collected in “wetfall deposition” (“red rain”). Bacterial biofilms (EPSs) that cement particles; f) surface detail of iberulite collected in “dry deposition”. Very fine bacterial filament (pilum or flagellum) (F) that crosses and stabilises the surface of the iberulite (similar to the “filaments” that connect the bacteria in the photomicrograph a). Images b), c), and d) are of samples collected in dry deposition in the summer of 2015; image e), summer 2016 in wetfall deposition; image f), summer 2010. All samples were taken at the sampling site. Figure courtesy of the journal Atmospheric Research, 248, 15 January 2021, 105260.  

The UGR researchers who participated in this work, seen here in the Faculty of Pharmacy.

Media enquiries:

Alberto Molinero Garcia

Department of Edaphology and Agricultural Chemistry, University of Granada

Email: amolinerogarcia@ugr.es 

New study analyses the relationship between ethics and health in times of pandemic crisis and underlines the importance of care and social justice

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The UGR has coordinated a monographic publication on COVID-19 that deals with various ethical issues related to the pandemic, addressing crucial challenges in the new world scenario from a multidisciplinary perspective: from the theoretical–deliberative to the applied, and from practical philosophy and ethics to medicine and epidemiology, via anthropology or psychology, among other disciplines 

A team of researchers from various specialisations and different countries and academic institutions, coordinated by Ester Massó Guijarro, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Granada (UGR), have analysed the relationship between ethics and health in times of pandemic crisis, underlining the importance of care and social justice. The results of their research are now available in the latest volume of the journal Enrahonar, published by the University of Barcelona.  

A total of 12 texts make up this special issue, all freely accessible from the journal website (https://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/issue/view/72/showToc). The publication deals with various ethical issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing crucial challenges in the new world scenario, with an emphasis on health from the perspective of care and social justice. The work takes a multidisciplinary approach, from the theoretical–deliberative to the applied, and from practical philosophy and ethics to medicine and epidemiology, via anthropology or psychology, among other disciplines.

For example, in ‘Childbirth and abortion in times of coronavirus: The impact of the pandemic on sexual and reproductive rights’, Massó and her fellow researcher Rosana Triviño Caballero explore the threats posed by the COVID-19 crisis for both pregnant people and their babies, as well as assessing the new opportunities for bringing greater visibility to these situations of injustice.

In another text, ‘No country for old men? Age as a triage criterion during the COVID-19 pandemic’, UGR researcher Jon Rueda Etxebarria talks about the ageism and gerontophobia that have seeped into the triage variables followed during the pandemic.

In the article by Lydia María de Tienda Palop, entitled ‘What does “war on coronavirus” mean?’, we find an analysis of the current concept of human safety, which has brought about changes such as the use of a wartime lexicon in public discourse. Other fundamental topics covered in the monograph are those of vulnerability and the role of frameworks for deliberation in the pandemic, as captured in titles such as ‘Vulnerability and deliberation in times of epidemic’ (Lydia Feito Grande) or ‘Health emergency: Two frameworks for deliberation’ (Mª Teresa López de la Vieja de la Torre and David Rodríguez-Arias Vailhen), even from a narrative ethics perspective (‘Contagion: Nothing spreads like fear’ by Miguel Melguizo Jiménez, Maite Cruz Piqueras, and Maribel Tamayo Velázquez). The work also addresses the crucial issue of ‘Ethics and health data protection in pandemics: A reference to the case of applications for contact tracking’ (María Belén Andreu Martínez and Txetxu Ausín Díez). 

The monograph highlights the importance of the ethical analysis of the possible COVID-19 vaccine in ‘“Haste makes waste”. An ethical analysis of the COVID-19 vaccine: Development, allocation and reticence’ (Maite Cruz Piqueras, Joaquín Hortal Carmona, and Javier Padilla Bernáldez) and provides a general reflection on the pharmaceutical industry (‘Essential drugs, patents and compulsory licenses: Doha is not the answer’, by María Julia Bertomeu and Salvador Bergel).  It also examines the intersectional-discrimination dimension of the pandemic, with an emphasis on functional diversity (‘COVID-19. When tragedy turns into opportunity: In search of an inclusive bioethics’, Soledad Arnau Ripollés) and childhood (‘Invisibility as a problem: First approaches to the situation of children under the COVID-19 pandemic confinement policy in Argentina’, by María Jimena Mantilla).

In Massó’s words, this is “almost a campaign monographic—put together urgently, not unlike those hospitals that were set up in a sea of sweat and tarpaulins—with a sense of emergency and emergence, reflecting some of the most crucial controversies that concern and confront us as a human community”.

The impulse behind this volume comes from the ESPACyOS network on Health Ethics for Action, Care and Social Observation of which many of the authors of the publication are members. This network is linked to the ‘FiloLab’ Scientific Unit of Excellence and was promoted by David Rodríguez-Arias, a senior lecturer at the UGR’s Department of Philosophy I.

As Massó points out , “the pandemic crisis thus also invites us to reconsider vulnerability as a human condition from the perspective of philosophy, human rights, and many other fields—a fragility that, in turn, leads us to the impure concept of compassion. Because empathy is not enough”.

The project entitled The Philosophical Laboratory on the Pandemic and the Anthropocene—created by the Spanish Philosophy Network (REF) with the aim of bringing together reflections and hosting philosophical debates on the pandemic—has launched an informative video entitled ‘Philosophy and Public Health’, in which Triviño and Massó discuss this work (https://youtu.be/qsJ-2uHcbGU).

Bibliography:

Massó Guijarro, Ester (ed.) (2020), ‘Ética y salud en tiempos de pandemia: reflexiones sobre cuidados y justicia social’. Monograph. Enrahonar. An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason 65. Online: https://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/article/view/v65-masso

Media enquiries:

Ester Massó Guijarro

Department of Philosophy I

Tel.: +34 958 243786

Email: ester@ugr.es