by Henrianne DE PONTBRIAND | 13 May, 2019 | Bioethics press synthesis
The latest innovation by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital is an autonomous robot navigating through pig hearts. This autonomous catheter can move by itself in a beating heart: it is equipped with optical ‘whiskers’, enabling it to move like certain...
by Henrianne DE PONTBRIAND | 13 May, 2019 | Bioethics press synthesis | Organ donation
Faced with the permanent shortage of organ donors, researchers are looking into alternatives. 3D-bioprinting “to build fully functional organs outside the body” has already begun to prove its worth: for example, to create artificial corneas that can be...
by Henrianne DE PONTBRIAND | 13 May, 2019 | Bioethics press synthesis | MAP – Surrogacy
In response to declining fertility rates in Scotland, the Conservatives have asked the government to consider “freezing oocytes” [1] for all women in Scotland. “Such opportunities are important and are increasingly becoming the norm throughout the...
by Henrianne DE PONTBRIAND | 13 May, 2019 | Bioethics press synthesis | Organ donation
The United Kingdom has recently adopted the presumed consent system for organ donation (see United Kingdom and Scotland introduce presumed consent to organ donation). The new law will come into force next year and specifies that a deceased person’s genitals and...
by Henrianne DE PONTBRIAND | 13 May, 2019 | Bioethics press synthesis | GMO
To make cassava plants resistant to ‘mosaic virus’, which can cause almost total loss of these plants in an epidemic, Australian researchers tried to “recombine the virus’s DNA” by genome editing, using CRISPR-Cas9. Both frightening and unexpected...