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Ethical Considerations Maria-Stella Portelli
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Articial organs: Human-made devices designed to replace, duplicate, or augment, functionally or cosmetically, a missing, diseased, or otherwise incompetent part of the body, either temporarily or permanently, and which require a non-biologic material interface with living tissue. Bioarticial organ: Device combining living elements (organelles, cells, or tissues) with synthetic materials in a therapeutic system. Implant: Any biomaterial or device which is actually embedded within the tissues of a living organism Prosthesis: An articial device to replace a missing part of the body. Ref: Prostheses and Articial Organs by Galletti and Nerem (2000)
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Prolong life Improve quality of life Replaces the use of heart/lung/kidney machines Availability of organs for donation Avoid xenotransplantation
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Doctors discovered a golf-ball-size tumour growing into Mr Beyenes windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. The doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute had a radical idea. He wanted to make Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells. Implanting such a bio-artificial organ would be a first-of-its-kind procedure for the field of regenerative medicine, which for decades has been promising a future of ready- made replacement organs - livers, kidneys, even hearts - built in the laboratory. In Beyenes case, an exact copy of his windpipe was made from a porous, fibrous plastic, which was then seeded with stem cells harvested from his bone marrow. After just a day and a half in a bioreactor - a kind of incubator in which the windpipe was spun, in a nutrient solution - the implant was stitched into Beyene, replacing his cancerous windpipe. Fifteen months after the groundbreaking surgery, Beyene, 39, is tumor-free and breathing normally.
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Could there be a time in which artificial organs could be better than the bodys own natural ones? - Hardly break down - Do not age - Not struck by disease Are we creating some sort of superhuman?
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Issues of identity (superiority/inferiority complex) Till what percentage can your body be replaced by artificial devices? Would a cyborg still be an autonomous person?
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To what extent should we try to lengthen the life span of humans? How should such goal be balanced against the goal of improving the quality of human life
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Increasing the division between the rich and the poor
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We would be messing around with personality, feeling, emotions, reasoning, memory, decision making … Could cyborgs be morally responsible for their behaviour when their brain has been engineered by others so as to function in a particular way? Should artificial devices that allow humans to have superior perception, cognition, motor control or positive moods and attitudes be allowed? The idea of brain dead – would we be resurrecting the dead?
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