By Brad Segal In January of this year, Cell published a study modestly titled, Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. It reports success bioengineering a mostly-pig partly-human embryo. One day before, Nature published a report that scientists had grown (for lack of a better word) a functioning genetically-mouse pancreas within the body of a…
By I. Glenn Cohen [WARNING: Spoilers below] On Sunday, HBO’s Westworld finished its run. Though I thought some of the early episodes were arguably a bit of a failure as television (and my partner almost jumped off the bandwagon of making this one of “our shows”) IMHO the show finished very strong. But whatever you…
By I. Glenn Cohen The science media is abuzz about the birth of a child using mitochondrial replacement techniques in Mexico to Jordanian parents at the hands of NY Doctors. A few quick reactions (I am heading to this unrelated NAS/IOM Committee meeting tomorrow evening so may have some more thoughts when that settles down). This is the…
By I. Glenn Cohen As reported by Science, today the NIH announced plans to lift a preemptive year long moratorium on funding chimera research – that which mixes human and animal cells, often at the embryonic stage. Here is a snippet from the Science article about the new proposed NIH process: According to two notices released today, NIH is…
By Jonathan Will The Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health is sure to be dissected in the coming days, weeks, and months. In the meantime, I wanted to quickly reengage the discussion about the status of the “purpose prong” of Casey and what, if anything, Whole Woman’s Health tells us about it. While Justice…
By Maayan Sudai A recent civil action filed by LAMBDA Legal highlights a debate ongoing for the past several years on the issue of “sex-markers” in official documentation to the U.S courts. In different instances, plaintiffs and interest groups have sought to challenge the state’s sex-binary classification system when issuing official identification documents such as…
By I. Glenn Cohen As I said in one of my earlier posts today one of the most interesting parts of the NAM report on mitochondrial replacement therapy was its recommendation that only male embryos be implanted and not female ones. The argument is that this will eliminate the risks of germ-line transmission of anything…
By I. Glenn Cohen My last post was a summary of the NAM’s Recommendations on Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy (MRT). Now here is my take on the report. But keep in mind the report was just released and all I could give it was a quick read, so these are really more like initial impressions:
By Maayan Sudai Ashley is young woman who was born in 1997 with a severe mental and physical disability that prevented her from ever eating, walking or talking by herself. Her mental capacity was also not expected to develop further than that of an infant. In 2004, When she was six and a half years…
By John A. Robertson The Rubio-Huckabee claim that actual and legal personhood start at conception has drawn trenchant responses from Art Caplan on the medical uncertainty of such a claim and David Orentlicher, drawing on Judith Thomson’s famous article, that even if a fetus is a person, woman would not necessarily have a duty to…
