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  • Support GPB Today
  • Podcast: Manufacturing Danger: The BioLab Story
  • TV Highlights This Week

News Articles: Bioethics

Biochemists Herbert Boyer (UCSF) and Paul Berg (Stanford) at a conference at Asilomar, February 26, 1975.

Tagged as: 

  • Science

50 years after a seminal conference, big questions about biotechnology remain

In 1975, researchers met to discuss the emerging field of biotechnology. The issues surrounding the field today are familiar.

February 25, 2025
|
By:
  • Nell Greenfieldboyce
Dr. Marty Sellers, wearing a red scrub cap, and his team from Tennessee Donor Services perform a normothermic regional perfusion organ recovery at a hospital in eastern Tennessee.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Doctors try a controversial technique to reduce the transplant organ shortage

Doctors say they can boost the odds donated organs will be usable by restarting blood circulation with a pump after donors are declared dead. Critics say the procedure blurs the definition of death.

July 08, 2024
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
Bumble pickleball ad. COVID masks.

Tagged as: 

  • Arts & Life

Bumble & the trap of modern dating; plus, living ethically in COVID's aftermath

This week, the dating app Bumble could not stay out of the news. First, the company launched an anti-celibacy advertising campaign mocking abstinence and suggesting women shouldn't give up on dating apps. Then, at a tech summit, Bumble's founder suggested artificial intelligence might be the future of dating. Both efforts were met with backlash, and during a time when everyone seems irritated with dating - where can people turn? Shani Silver, author of the Cheaper Than Therapy substack, and KCRW's Myisha Battle, dating coach and host of How's Your Sex Life? join the show to make sense of the mess.

Then, it's been four years since the start of the COVID pandemic. So much has changed - especially attitudes towards public health. Brittany talks to, Dr. Keisha S. Ray, a bioethicist, to hear how public health clashed with American culture - how we're supposed to live among people with different risk tolerance - and what all this means for the next pandemic.

May 17, 2024
|
By:
  • Barton Girdwood,
  • Alexis Williams,
  • and 5 more
Dr. Jeffrey Stern, assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, prepare the gene-edited pig kidney with thymus for transplantation.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

A woman with failing kidneys receives genetically modified pig organs

Surgeons transplanted a kidney and thymus gland from a gene-edited pig into a 54-year-old woman in an attempt to extend her life. It's the latest experimental use of animal organs in humans.

April 25, 2024
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
Surgeon Christoph Haller and his research team from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children are working on technology that could someday result in an artificial womb to help extremely premature babies.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

An artificial womb could build a bridge to health for premature babies

Artificial wombs could someday save babies born very prematurely. Even though the experimental technology is still in animal tests, there are mounting questions about its eventual use with humans.

April 12, 2024
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
A young, genetically modified pig raised at a Revivicor farm for organ transplantation research.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

How genetically modified pigs could end the shortage of organs for transplants

Scientists are optimistic that gene-edited animals could provide a new source of organs for transplantation. Pig organs modified to minimize rejection are now being tested in humans.

February 29, 2024
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
Diana and Paul Zucknick have tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to have children. The Austin, Texas, couple are intrigued by scientific research that may someday make it possible to create eggs and sperm from their skin cells.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Infertile people, gay and trans couples yearn for progress on lab-made eggs and sperm

An experimental technology that might someday allow infertile couples, as well as gay and trans couples, to have genetically related children stirs hope. So far, the technique has worked in mice.

December 13, 2023
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
Conception's chief scientific officer, Pablo Hurtado, examines very early primordial germ cells under a microscope in a company lab in Berkeley, California.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Startup aims to make lab-grown human eggs, transforming options for creating families

New companies are working to commercialize in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, a technology that could make human eggs and sperm in the lab from any cell in the body.

July 15, 2023
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
In London to address a gene-editing summit last week, Victoria Gray took a break to visit Sir John Soane's Museum. In 2019, Gray became the first patient to be treated for sickle cell disease using CRISPR, an experimental gene-editing technique. She was invited to talk about her experiences at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Sickle cell patient's success with gene editing raises hopes and questions

A Mississippi woman's life has been transformed by a treatment for sickle cell disease with the gene-editing technique CRISPR. All her symptoms from a disease once thought incurable have disappeared.

March 16, 2023
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
Researchers meeting in London this week concluded that techniques that have made it easier to manipulate DNA still produce too many mistakes for scientists to be confident any children born from edited embryos (such as these, photographed in 2018) would be healthy.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Ethical concerns temper optimism about gene-editing for human diseases

The Third International Summit on Genome Editing concluded Monday with ethicists warning scientists to slow down efforts to use gene-editing to enhance the health of embryos.

March 10, 2023
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
An artist's impression of a woolly mammoth in a snow-covered environment.

Tagged as: 

  • Science

Scientists Say They Could Bring Back Woolly Mammoths. But Maybe They Shouldn't

A company formed by Harvard genetics professor George Church, known for his pioneering work in genome sequencing and gene splicing, hopes to genetically resurrect woolly mammoths.

September 15, 2021
|
By:
  • Scott Neuman
Using fluorescent antibody-based stains and advanced microscopy, researchers are able to visualize cells of different species origins in an early stage chimeric embryo. The red color indicates the cells of human origin.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Scientists Create Early Embryos That Are Part Human, Part Monkey

An international team has put human cells into monkey embryos in hopes of finding new ways to produce organs for transplantation. But some ethicists still worry about how such research could go wrong.

April 15, 2021
|
By:
  • Rob Stein
Florida's Pasco County Health Department and the Army National Guard partnered with Fellowship Church in Tampa, Fla., to help city residents age 65 and older get immunized with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in February.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

OPINION: 5 Ways To Make The Vaccine Rollout More Equitable

Getting the COVID-19 vaccine into most Americans' arms will involve much more than a good supply and logistics. Values such as equity, deep listening, and informed choice are crucial, too.

March 25, 2021
|
By:
  • Faith E. Fletcher and
  • Aletha Maybank
Two health care workers prepare syringes with AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine in London Monday. A U.K. study will expose volunteers to the coronavirus and could help development of future vaccines.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Why Scientists Are Infecting Healthy Volunteers With The Coronavirus

Exposing people to a potentially fatal disease could hasten understanding of COVID-19 and development of new vaccines and treatments. But the risks of such studies raise serious ethical questions.

March 08, 2021
|
By:
  • Joe Palca
Leyda Valentine, a research coordinator, takes blood from Lisa Taylor as she participates in a COVID-19 vaccination study at Research Centers of America in Hollywood, Fla., in August 2020.

Tagged as: 

  • Health

Long-Term Studies Of COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt By Placebo Recipients Getting Immunized

Researchers are trying to learn more about COVID-19 vaccines from original study participants. The quest is hampered because many people who first received a placebo shot are opting for the vaccine.

February 19, 2021
|
By:
  • Richard Harris
  • Load More

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