By SHARI RUDAVSKY

 Let the Elian-ology begin.

 Wednesday night, members of the South Florida Bioethics Network devoted their meeting to ruminating about recent events.

 For the philosophers, law professors and other academics gathered at Nova Southeastern University's law school in Davie, the saga of Elian represents a golden teaching moment and a novel case study.

 ``This case raises so many fascinating issues. You couldn't have written this sort of thing,'' said Bruce Winick, a law professor at the University of Miami.

 The group discussed the role of mothers vs. fathers in a child's life, whether it is appropriate to train a camera on a child against the father's wishes and whether Elian has a legitimate claim to political asylum.

 Charles Culver, a psychiatrist who heads Barry University's didactic studies program, posed the question of what weight to give a psychological evaluation in which the evaluator does not meet the subject.

 ``What can a psychiatrist or psychologist say plausibly who has not seen the child?'' he asked.

 Across the country, professionals identified other questions prompted by the past half-year of Elian Gonzalez's life.

 For Diane Schetky, a member of the American Academy for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's ethics committee, the notion that the boy could apply for asylum was absurd.

 ``He's not psychologically competent. Developmentally that makes no sense. That has to be an adult or adolescent decision,'' said Schetky, a psychiatrist in Rockport, Maine.

 Stephen Herman, a child custody expert and psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, said that psychiatry's only role in this case should have been to determine how to ease the boy's return to his father.

 Any other evaluations constituted ``a misuse of psychiatry,'' Herman said. ``This has never been a custody case, in my opinion. This is a question of the government dragging its feet in terms of an undocumented alien.''

 Psychiatrists who saw the child and shared their medical opinions with the news media violated one of the cardinal rules of the profession, he said.

 ``I was astonished by that,'' he said. ``Excuse me, but are we professionals or not?''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald