Research in dentistry will continue through the work of young researchers already begun in the past year, and which will continue around the painful body in a qualitative and ethical perspective.
Projects
The ethics researchers intend to continue their research on the observation of the diversity of procedures for informing relatives in Europe, in the field of rare diseases.
This inter-team project will focus on a specific case where the patient's body is treated using the resources of another's body. In this case, the body is no longer simply the receptacle of treatments but becomes itself a means of treatment available to patients in a life-threatening situation (leukemia, sickle cell disease, etc.).
In the event of death, other social norms unfold because respect for the body does not disappear with death. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has given an insight into the cultural invariants in the respect due to the body of the deceased. The duty of decency that the living recognize towards the cadaveric body is imposed even when the person has donated his or her body to science, within a recently reinforced normative framework. During the next contract, the removal of elements from the cadaveric body at the request of the judicial authorities will be the subject of a renewed deontological approach through the digitization of forensic resources.
The concept of the self has made it possible to think of the organism under the category of identity in order to account for the unity and effectiveness of the system of defense of its integrity. The dualism of self and non-self posits that an organism defends itself by an immune reaction against an external element ("non-self") while sparing the entities recognized as its own ("self").
The "self/non-self" model is based on the reasoning by analogy long decried by epistemologists, as well as the use of metaphors borrowed from social life, which lead to thinking of the body's self-normativity on the model of a community of competing pathogens (pathogens tolerated by the "self" as endogenous entities) but sufficiently unified to fight against potentially aggressive external agents.
Research on the estimation of the age of immature children is one of the strong identity markers of our team, and has given it international recognition for nearly 20 years. In a forensic context, the challenge is to make the decision of the Justice system more reliable in order to qualify a crime or a homicide (reaching the age of fetal viability, foeticide or neonaticide, justified choice of one method rather than another). In an archaeo-thanatological context, the challenge is to understand and interpret modes of burial or choices of burial sites according to age categories, and to be able to discuss the socio-cultural aspects of age-dependent funeral rites.
As a "forensic science", forensic anthropology must meet strict methodological constraints with regard to the stakes of the conclusions drawn. The reliability of the analytical processing chains of remains (skeletonized or not) which leads to the estimation of the biological profile presented in a court of law is part of it, and an interdisciplinary approach integrating the recent advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning is able to bring significant progress.