Opinion: Here are some questions about the pig heart transplant that people actually should be asking
By Arthur Caplan, Laura Kimberly, Brendan Parent, and Tamar Schiff,
The Washington Post
| 01. 14. 2022
Arthur Caplan, Laura Kimberly, Brendan Parent and Tamar Schiff are members of the transplant ethics and policy working group in the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Those who closely follow research in the field of transplantation have been expecting that someday a genetically edited pig organ would be transplanted into a living human. But when the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore announced that on Jan. 7 a genetically edited pig heart had been given to a human recipient, the news came as a surprise.
The operation, known as a xenotransplant, was widely described in the media as a “success,” but there are many questions that need answers to justify undertaking what is a hugely risky experiment.
Maybe the Maryland team already has good answers, and maybe the case will be reported in detail in peer-reviewed journals so that other medical teams can learn from their pioneering effort. But since this transplant was done as an emergency rescue, not a clinical trial, the data acquired are likely to be only anecdotal and perhaps...
Related Articles
By Anumita Kaur [cites CGS’ Katie Hasson], The Washington Post | 03.25.2025
Genetic information company 23andMe has said that it is headed to bankruptcy court, raising questions for what happens to the DNA shared by millions of people with the company via saliva test kits.
Sunday’s announcement clears the way for a new...
By Peter Wehling, Tino Plümecke, and Isabelle Bartram
| 03.26.2025
This article was originally published as “Soziogenomik und polygene Scores” in issue 272 (February 2025) of the German-language journal Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst (GID); translated by the authors.
In mid-November 2024, the British organization Hope not Hate published its investigative research ‘Inside the Eugenics Revival’. In addition to documentating an active international “race research” network, the investigation also brought to light the existence of a US start-up that offers eugenic embryo selection. Heliospect Genomics aims to enable wealthy couples to...
By Frank Landymore, Futurism | 03.18.2025
You can only throw so much money at a problem.
This, more or less, is the line being taken by AI researchers in a recent survey. Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general...
By Craig S. Smith, Forbes | 03.08.2025
One recent evening in Shenzhen, a group of software engineers gathered in a dimly lit co-working space, furiously typing as they monitored the performance of a new AI system. The air was electric, thick with the hum of servers and...