Presentation

The Master's Degree and Ph.D. Degree in Medical, Dental and Health Sciences Program was approved by the Academic Council for the Biological and Health Sciences Area on 14 December, 1998. It is the result of a long process of maturation involving a constant search for the joint, synergetic participation of the colleges, schools, institutes and centers of UNAM, dedicated to cultivating disciplines or related branches of the expert knowledge required to approach, from the perspective of modern science, the health-disease process as a complex, multicausal phenomenon in which numerous variables are related.

In this process, we have learned to organize ourselves and collaborate in novel ways in order to bring a project of these dimensions to fruition. This has fundamentally been the result of institutional generosity which, once again, has shown the potential for joint collaboration among academic university organizations and institutions of the health sector in permitting the construction of new spheres in which to project academic life and advance in the fields of medicine, dentistry and health sciences.

The Program presented here constitutes a second adaptation to the General Postgraduate Studies Regulations. The preceding program, Master's Degrees and Ph.D. Degrees in Medical and Health Sciences Program, dates from 1997 and was generated through the collaboration between the School of Medicine and the Cell Physiology and Biomedical Research Institutes. With this second adaptation, two further schools were incorporated: Philosophy and Letters and Dentistry.

The School of Philosophy and Letters will be an important commencement to strengthening relations between this Program and the Humanities area as a whole, since for first time in UNAM the Sciences and Humanities areas have been articulated in a postgraduate program. The immediate result has been the confirmation of a curricular space for the study of Bioethics, a matter that must be urgently attended in our country. Formerly, the Program comprised only two fields of knowledge: Medical and Health Sciences. With the incorporation of the School of Dentistry, the Program now includes the Dental Sciences Field of Knowledge and, in this way, has been able to broaden its inter and multidisciplinary horizons.

The Program is constantly being enhanced with the participation of tutors and professors from other academic bodies of UNAM, such as the School of Psychology, the Institutes of Physics, Materials Research, Anthropological Research and Philosophical Research and the Sciences of the Atmosphere Center, and from various institutions of the health sector with a broad academic trajectory, like the Mexican Social Security Institute, the Salvador Zubirán National Nutrition Institute, the National Neurology and Neurosurgery Institute, and Mexican Psychiatric Institute and the National Cancerology Institute.

Finally, it should be pointed out that this type of postgraduate program constitutes a firm basis for the development of new lines of research and inter and multidisciplinary projects leading to solutions to health problems and the training of highly qualified human resources.

Luis Felipe Abreu Hernández