Short bio:

Gilberto Corbellini was until April 2021 director of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage of the National Research Council. He holds a PhD in public health and is professor of medical history and of bioethics at Sapienza University of Rome. He has studied several aspects of the historical-epistemological evolution of biomedical sciences in the twentieth century, precisely the history immunosciences, neuroscience, psychiatry, molecular medicine and the conceptualization of disease and health across the evolution of medical thinking, as well as the emergence of ethical and social issues in relation to the cognitive and applicative advances of biomedicine. He has been interested in history and epistemology of medical pedagogy and has carried out research on the history of malaria and malariology in Italy. In recent years he has studied with a naturalistic approach the role played by the dissemination of science and its cognitive foundation in promoting the emergence and diffusion of Western democratic and liberal values, as well as the cognitive causes of the persistence of pseudoscientific ideas. Since about 1990 he has written in widely distributed newspapers and periodicals, dealing with popular but also controversial aspects of scientific and technological innovations in the fields of biological and medical sciences. He has published twenty books, nearly a hundred articles in specialized journals.