François Ansermet appointed to the French Committee of Ethics
16 December 2013
François Ansermet, psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist and member of Synapsy, is the first non-French expert to serve on the French ethics advisory board.
Progress in research brings with it ethical issues-research on embryos, surrogate motherhood, end-of-life concerns, donating organs-and sometimes it’s difficult to know which side to take. For this, France has the National Consultative Committee of Ethics (Comité Consultatif National d’Ethique –CCNE-), a body of 40 specialists from different backgrounds who are there to give advisory opinions on ethical matters. During the committee’s remodelling in September, the first foreign expert joined the ranks: Professor François Ansermet, psychoanalyst, Head of the Department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Geneva University Hospitals and project leader at the NCCR-Synapsy.
“Clinically-wise, François Ansermet has advanced child liaison psychiatry with paediatrics, taking a psychoanalytical approach with emphasis on the perinatal period. His research is devoted to the consequences of pre- and perinatal trauma and the subjective impact of new advances in perinatal biotechnology; particularly in medically assisted reproduction, gender assignment in cases of ambiguous genitalia and predictive medicine. Furthermore, in collaboration with Prof. Pierre Magistretti, he is pursuing links between neuroscience and psychiatry based on the paradigm of neuronal plasticity; in this respect, in 2010; he created the Agalma Foundation which centres on research into neuroscience and psychoanalysis as well as the relationships between art, science and psychoanalysis”, explains the CCNE website.
Author : Anne-Muriel Brouet, EPFL
