1,800 people participate in the B·Debate activities
Throughout 2013, B·Debate-International Center for Scientific Debate has organised a dozen activities with the participation of the best international specialists in areas such as infectious diseases, the application of nanotechnology to health, the health impact of pollution and neuroregeneration, among others. In total, 12 debates were organised in which 225 speakers and more than 1,800 people have taken part.
B·Debate – International Center for Scientific Debate – Barcelona is a joint initiative of Biocat and "la Caixa" Social Foundation, which was launched in 2009. Its main objective is to promote high-level international meetings to encourage dialogue and debate on ground-breaking scientific research and, at the same time, to position Barcelona and Catalonia as a world benchmark for research.
B·Debate combines closed discussion for small groups of specialists, symposia open to all the Catalan scientific community, and conferences and lectures addressed to the general public. For logistical reasons, the final debate of the 2013 programme was actually held in January 2014.
The 2013 programme was as follows:
- Advances in Plasmodium vivax Malaria Research (May)
- Urban air quality: the challenge of non-exhaust road transport emissions (July)
- Towards in Silico Humans. A Challenge for Exascale Computing Area (September)
- The Death of Plant Cells: from Proteasas to Field Applications (October)
- Nanotechnologies in Health: Current Challenges and Future Prospects (October)
- Is Neuroregeneration the Common Frontier for Neurosciencies, Robotics and Rehabilitation? (October)
- Green Cities, Healthy People – Planning Healthy Urban Spaces (October)
- Evolution and culture. Human nature in transformation (October-November)
- The Global Threat of the Antimicrobial Resistance: What Can We Do? (November)
- Barcelona Conferences on Epigenetics and Cancer (November)
- Impact of Ageing on Mental Health and Well-being (January 2014)
The scientific debates have been jointly organised with a dozen organisations and international reference centres such as the New York Academy of Sciences, NYAS, the Institute of Environmental Diagnosis, and Water Studies of the CSIC, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Barcelona Institute of Biomedical Research (IRB), the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB), the Institut Guttmann, the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (Institute), the Centre de Recerca en Salut Internacional de Barcelona (CRESIB), the Institute of Predictive and Personalized Medicine of Cancer (IMPPC) and the Fundació Sant Joan de Déu.
It has also had the collaboration of several research organisations, such as the Molecular Biology Institute of Barcelona (IBMB), the Catalan Bioengineering Institute (IBEC), the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and the Institut d ' Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge (IDIBELL), among others.
All the information about B·Debate can be found on its website, where materials generated by each event (speeches, videos, interviews, manifestos, etc.) have been published.
