The year of 2023 was overshadowed by wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, in Israel and Gaza. In addition, while the Covid-19 pandemic has still not disappeared, outbreaks of serious diseases were much less frequent and strict measures were no longer applied.
Despite all difficulties, this past year was marked by a large number of annual meetings and workshops with physical presence which, after two years of online conferences, provided excellent opportunities for the intellectual exchange of ideas. In international scientific life there were also cheerful moments. Katalin Karikó and her research partner, Drew Weissman won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Assembly acknowledged the researchers “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.” The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier, for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter. It was a special privilege for me that at the beginning of the year both Katalin Karikó and myself attended at a conference titled “Converging on the Person: Emerging Technologies for the Common Good,” held in the Vatican at the Auditorium of the Patristic Institute Augustinianum in Rome, on February 22–23, 2023. The introductory speech was delivered by Pope Francis.
In Hungary the most important event in the field of bioethics was Dániel Karsai’s fight for self-determination and the autonomy of end-of-life decisions. He is a lawyer who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). For months he managed to put the issue of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the center of public and media attention. Furthermore, he filed a petition to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Several workshops and media discussions were dedicated to this topic which was unprecedented in the Hungarian history of bioethics so far. The clear legal reasoning provided by the applicant-patient himself also made this case very special. I was appointed as an expert on bioethics in front of the Court, and I was providing my answers during a special hearing before the open session of this case.
In 2022 and 2023 CELAB’s main research activity was based on the Leviathan Project (its full name is Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good), which seeks to reconstruct the development of a common European identity after the Second World War, especially in the fields of public health and health care. In October 2019, a multidisciplinary and transnational research team, in which I am one of the Principal Investigators, received the prestigious Synergy Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) to finance our research for six years. The funding for the CEU team that I have the responsibility to build and coordinate is approximately 2.4 million euros for this period. The total amount of the grant is close to 10 million euros—the maximum possible amount of an ERC Synergy Grant. The project started in October 2020 and right at the beginning it had to overcome administrative hurdles posed by fundamental institutional changes—one within the European Union as a result of Brexit, the other one within the Central European University that relocated to Vienna as CEU-PU.
Interdisciplinary collaboration, the hallmark of CELAB, is also a key aspect of our ERC team. What we have found to be most beneficial and intellectually stimulating was the effect of methodological pluralism on our research processes. We expect that the findings of our research will be groundbreaking as a result of working with previously unknown sources (such as the personal archives of important figures in the history of medicine), and as significant intellectual and professional alliances across the two sides of the systemic divide of the Cold War will be revealed. Research on health laws and the public health regulations of the period has proven to be novel, as has research on the post-war European development of medical deontology and ethical codes, developments in pharmaceutical trials across Europe, and different levels of collaboration regarding health communications across Europe.
In the topics of our research, we participated in several conferences. In April Éva Földes and myself delivered a paper with the title “Reproduction and Privacy in the Post-War Netherlands and Hungary” at the European Social Science History Conference held in Gothenburg, Sweden. In the Leviathan Project workshop organized in June at the University of Hamburg, and titled “Beyond Binaries: Gender, Sexuality, and Medicine in Post-War Europe,” Viola Lászlófi and myself presented a paper on “Women Facing the Committee: Decision Making on Abortion in Postwar Hungary.” In September I attended another Leviathan Project workshop in Berlin. It was titled “Socialist Governmentality? Healthcare, Technologies of the Self, and Subjectification in European State Socialism, 1945–1990” and organized by the Berlin team of the Leviathan Project. Just like the other Principal Investigators, I acted as a commentator to two papers.
Representing the Budapest team of the Leviathan project, Péter Kakuk and myself participated at the 35th Annual Conference of the European Society for the Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care (ESPMH), titled Methods in Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine. The conference was organized jointly by ESPMH, the Institute of Clinical and Preventive Medicine of the University of Latvia, and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Latvia in Riga, Latvia, on August 23–26, 2023. Péter presented a paper on “Opening Up Past Futures: Eugenics, Family Planning and the Liberalization of Abortion” and I contributed with a presentation titled “From the Biopolitics of Reproduction to the Bioethics of Reproduction.” Péter also took part in a Special Seminar on Assisted Dying, Euthanasia, and Autonomy with his paper on “End-of-Life Decisions in Hungary: The Hospital Black Box.”
In the summer of 2023 we launched a job search and interviewed applicants. As a result, we have two new team members, Barna Szamosi and Branka Bogdan. Barna joined the team in November 2023 and Branka is going to follow him in January 2024. Further information on the progress of the Leviathan Project can be found at our website: leviathan-europe.eu.
We also continued to participate in projects that are not within a European research framework. The International Academic Network on Bioethics (RUIB–IANB) has been organizing annual workshops on various bioethics-related topics and the main purpose of these collaborations is to apply a comparative perspective to the analysis of the selected topic. Although the conferences have not reconvened since the Covi-19 pandemic, the members of the network still work together online on the previous workshop proceedings. The papers presented and discussed at the workshops are collected into edited volumes and almost 20 books have been already published with the chapters written by the network members. The last two volumes were issued by LEH Éditions in Bourdeaux, France in 2022 and 2023. The first, titled Le consentement à l’acte médical, autonomie réelle ou fictive? (Consent to Medical Treatment: Real or Fictional Autonomy?), came out in September 2022. I contributed to this book with a chapter on the case of implementing the concept of informed consent into Hungarian law, titled “Le consentement à l’acte médical en Hongrie, entre un choix délibéré et une condition purement formelle.” The second volume, titled L’acte médical pour autrui: Panorama international (Medical Interventions for the Benefit of Others) and published in October 2023, provides a comparative survey on medical procedures that benefit other people than those targeted by the intervention, such as in the case of organ donation. My chapter, titled “Actes médicaux dans l’intérêt d’autrui en Hongrie” focused on the Hungarian example.
For an edited book on regulating abortion around the world (L’interruption de grossesse en droit comparé: Entre cultures et universalisme?) I wrote a chapter in which I assessed the changes in the Post-War regulations on abortion in Hungary titled “Hongrie: Tension entre un cadre juridique relativement libéral et une politique nataliste.” I also described the nature of Hungarian pronatalist politics and its manifestation in different periods of time. I examined the current law and its modification, the relevant decisions of the Constitutional Court, also the evolution of the Hungarian abortion law within a relatively liberal framework but with pronatalist aims.
Another volume was published in 2022 with the title the Cambridge Handbook of Information Technology, Life Sciences, and Human Rights at the Cambridge University Press, in which I wrote a chapter on “The Right to Have a Child: Through the Lens of the Third Phase Reproductive Technologies.” This chapter looks at various new technologies that present alternatives to natural reproduction and provides an ethical assessment on whether one could construct a positive right to have a child.
During 2022–2023 I continued to take part in the activities of the World Association for Medical Law (WAML), serving as a member of the Board of Governors and contributing to the WAML Newsletter as guest editor in the topics of gene editing; the application of artificial intelligence in health care; and physician assisted dying. I also attended the annual conference of WAML, which took place in Vilnius in August 2023. My presentation, titled “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Privacy and Emerging Technologies in Health Care” discussed various cases where privacy is challenged and explored possible solutions within biomedical law.
I have been member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Jury of the Falling Walls competitions since 2020 and promoted innovative research in such fields as population health equity, gender equality, and the social implications of new technologies. In 2023 I became mentor in the Falling Walls Female Science Talents program.
Violeta Beširević continued her work as a Chief Editor of Pravni zapiši, a journal on legal theory published in Serbian and English. In 2023 she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Law at Union University, Belgrade.
On March 10, 2023, CELAB once again organized the UNISTEM Day at the CEU Budapest campus with the active participation of students from various secondary schools. Presentations were given by excellent researchers, such as András Dinnyés, Elen Gócza, and András Füredi.
CELAB maintains productive professional relations with the Democracy Institute in the Budapest campus, and also with faculty at the Vienna campus where CEU-PU operates.
Further information on our activities can be found in our previous Annual Reports; on our Facebook page www.facebook.com/Center.CELAB; and posted to the CELAB subsite of the CEU website celab.ceu.edu.
Judit Sándor
Director of the Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine (CELAB)
