Ethics

Recently a 57-year-old man received a breakthrough operation. He was bedridden for several months and desperately needed a heart transplant. However, he had several health conditions which made him not suitable for the operation. In a last attempt to save the patient’s life, the Food and Drug Administration gave permission to attempt a genetically modified pig heart transplant for the first time in history. 

The operation was successful. Not only was the patient saved, but the medicine came closer to solving the problem of organ shortages. Unfortunately, the story is not as happy as it might seem.

CNN reports that scientists have created a mouse embryo that's 4% human. The hybrid is what scientists call a human-animal chimera, a single organism that is made up of two different sets of cells. This human-mouse chimera has by far the highest number of human cells ever recorded in an animal.

The team's experiment indicates that there is enough evolutionary compatibility between mice and humans that mouse embryos are a relatively good environment for cultivating human cells. This breakthrough could potentially generate better mouse models to study human diseases, including Covid-19. Mice can also be used to grow human immune cells or respiratory cells.

In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients—even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives, creating a difference of more than 20 years in life expectancy between the rich and the poor.

When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is at most a collective shrug. At the same time, behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but are used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance.

​It seems like everyone is getting into blockchain these days. After all, companies claim to like "transparency", "security", and anything to do with the roller coaster ride that is Bitcoin. But consider this: Tuna.

There are now several blockchain-based projects that aim to stop illegal tuna fishing. The idea is that blockchain-verification would assure consumers and others that the fish were ethically sourced. Or maybe it's just PR, who knows.

Blockchain is essentially a shared digital database that can be updated, but stored entries can't be changed or deleted. It's prohibitively hard to fake information that's tracked using blockchain. In this case, it can certify that something is legit and ethically sourced, such as tuna. Visser and Hanich continue: