The world's main religions can find common ground on the duty to protect vulnerable human beings, though the reasons and scope of this protection differ vastly, a conference of bioethics experts in Rome was told. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian and Hindu scholars met October 9-11 at the Legionaries of Christ-run Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum under the auspices of the UNESCO chair in bioethics and human rights. The conference's premise was that advances in biomedicine make certain individuals and groups vulnerable because of their inability to defend themselves and that world religions can help mediate in light of their traditions. “All religions agree, with some slight differences, on the fact that vulnerable humans must be protected and that some categories – women, children, the sick, the elderly, the disabled – are more at risk than others,” said conference academic coordinator Father Joseph Tham. “But the concept of a person's or group’s rights to be protected, as something that can be claimed from society, is not shared by Asian religions. They rather see it as a duty exercised by the family, or the peers, or society itself.” In Hinduism, for example “only a person’s inner self, the soul, was indivisible,” while “in this world view neither 'a man’s home or his body' was a 'castle' and in 'personal' matters affecting the self and the body, the family’s chief males made decisions for dependent members of the family,” wrote Prakash Desai, professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Illinois in one of the papers presented at the conference. No religion except Buddhism “speaks explicitly of the human experience of bodily vulnerability,” said Ellen Zhang, a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Ethics. She quoted as an example the story of the young prince Siddhartha, who chose to set on his “journey of enlightenment” after “his 'personal experience of seeing the 'four passing signs, three of which are about the experience of human vulnerability: ageing, sickness, and death.”