Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning, which is the reproduction of human cells and tissue. It does not refer to the natural conception and delivery of identical twins. The possibility of human cloning has raised controversies. These ethical concerns have prompted several nations to pass laws regarding human cloning.
In multicellular organisms, stem cells are undifferentiated or partially differentiated cells that can differentiate into various types of cells and proliferate indefinitely to produce more of the same stem cell. They are the earliest type of cell in a cell lineage. They are found in both embryonic and adult organisms, but they have slightly different properties in each. They are usually distinguished from progenitor cells, which cannot divide indefinitely, and precursor or blast cells, which are usually committed to differentiating into one cell type.
In genetics and developmental biology, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is a laboratory strategy for creating a viable embryo from a body cell and an egg cell. The technique consists of taking an enucleated oocyte and implanting a donor nucleus from a somatic (body) cell. It is used in both therapeutic and reproductive cloning. In 1996, Dolly the sheep became famous for being the first successful case of the reproductive cloning of a mammal:(. In January 2018, a team of scientists in Shanghai announced the successful cloning of two female crab-eating macaques from foetal nuclei.
Tissue engineering is a biomedical engineering discipline that uses a combination of cells, engineering, materials methods, and suitable biochemical and physicochemical factors to restore, maintain, improve, or replace different types of biological tissues. Tissue engineering often involves the use of cells placed on tissue scaffolds in the formation of new viable tissue for a medical purpose but is not limited to applications involving cells and tissue scaffolds. While it was once categorized as a sub-field of biomaterials, having grown in scope and importance it can be considered as a field in its own.
Neuroethics refers to two related fields of study: what the philosopher Adina Roskies has called the ethics of neuroscience, and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience comprises the bulk of work in neuroethics. It concerns the ethical, legal and social impact of neuroscience, including the ways in which neurotechnology can be used to predict or alter human behavior and "the implications of our mechanistic understanding of brain function for society... integrating neuroscientific knowledge with ethical and social thought".
Ruth Levitas is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol. She is well known internationally for her research on utopia and utopian studies.
The stem cell controversy is the consideration of the ethics of research involving the development and use of human embryos. Most commonly, this controversy focuses on embryonic stem cells. Not all stem cell research involves human embryos. For example, adult stem cells, amniotic stem cells, and induced pluripotent stem cells do not involve creating, using, or destroying human embryos, and thus are minimally, if at all, controversial. Many less controversial sources of acquiring stem cells include using cells from the umbilical cord, breast milk, and bone marrow, which are not pluripotent.
Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist of Romanian origins. He is Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Co-Director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is Visiting Professorial Fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law at Melbourne University since 2017. He directs the Biomedical Ethics Research Group and is a member of the Centre for Ethics of Pediatric Genomics in Australia. He is a former editor and current board member of the Journal of Medical Ethics, which is ranked as the No.1 journal in bioethics worldwide by Google Scholar Metrics as of 2013. In addition to his background in applied ethics and philosophy, he also has a background in medicine and neuroscience and completed his MBBS (Hons) and BMedSc at Monash University, graduating top of his class with 18 of 19 final year prizes in Medicine. He edits the Oxford University Press book series, the Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics.
Hannah Landecker is an author and Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research interests are the social and historical study of biotechnology and life science, from 1900 to the present, the intersections of biology and technology, with a particular focus on cells, and the in vitro conditions of life in research settings. Hannah Landecker was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University through 2007. She was a visiting scholar at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Texas's Institute for Medical Humanities in 2004, where she worked on a project that examined the changing human relationship to living matter in an age of biotechnology. Through a history of the technical manipulation of living cells, she looked at how biological things, including those made with human tissues, have been turned into tools and commercial objects. She is also worked on developing new methods and curricula for teaching the history and social study of biotechnology to undergraduates. Dr. Landecker has degrees from the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT (PhD), and the University of British Columbia (BSc). Recent work includes looking at ways in which antibiotic resistance has become a key marker of the Anthropocene.
Sean J. Morrison is a Canadian-American stem cell biologist and cancer researcher. Morrison is the director of Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern, a nonprofit research institute established in 2011 as a joint venture between Children’s Health System of Texas and UT Southwestern Medical Center. The CRI was established in 2011 by Morrison with the mission to perform transformative biomedical research at the interface of stem cell biology, cancer, and metabolism to better understand the biological basis of disease. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and member of the National Academy of Medicine. From 2015 to 2016 Morrison served as the president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Jonathan D. Moreno is an American philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine.
Mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), sometimes called mitochondrial donation, is the replacement of mitochondria in one or more cells to prevent or ameliorate disease. MRT originated as a special form of in vitro fertilisation in which some or all of the future baby's mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) comes from a third party. This technique is used in cases when mothers carry genes for mitochondrial diseases. The therapy is approved for use in the United Kingdom. A second application is to use autologous mitochondria to replace mitochondria in damaged tissue to restore the tissue to a functional state. This has been used in clinical research in the United States to treat cardiac-compromised newborns.
Sarah Franklin is an American anthropologist who has substantially contributed to the fields of feminism, gender studies, cultural studies and the social study of reproductive and genetic technology. She has conducted fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology and stem cell research. Her work combines both ethnographic methods and kinship theory, with more recent approaches from science studies, gender studies and cultural studies. In 2001 she was appointed to a Personal Chair in the Anthropology of Science, the first of its kind in the UK, and a field she has helped to create. She became Professor of Social Studies of Biomedicine in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics in 2004. In 2011 she was elected to the Professorship of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.
I. Glenn Cohen is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also the director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.
Diana W. Bianchi is an American medical geneticist and neonatologist noted for her research on fetal cell microchimerism and prenatal testing. She is the director of the Eunice Kennedy ShriverNational Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health. Bianchi had previously been the Natalie V. Zucker Professor of Pediatrics, Obstetrics, and Gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine and executive director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center. She also has served as Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center.
Françoise Elvina Baylis is a Canadian bioethicist whose work is at the intersection of applied ethics, health policy, and practice. The focus of her research is on issues of women's health and assisted reproductive technologies, but her research and publication record also extend to such topics as research involving humans, gene editing, novel genetic technologies, public health, the role of bioethics consultants, and neuroethics. Baylis' interest in the impact of bioethics on health and public policy as well as her commitment to citizen engagement]and participatory democracy sees her engage with print, radio, television, and other online publications.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agriculture products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Rana Dajani is a Palestinian-Jordanian molecular biologist and tenured professor of biology and biotechnology at Hashemite University. She earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Iowa. Dajani is an expert on genetics of Circassian and Chechen populations in Jordan, also on conducting genome-wide association studies on diabetes and cancer on stem cells. Her work in stem cell research initiated the development of the Stem Cell Research Ethics Law and all regulations in Jordan. She is an advocate for the biological evolution theory in relation to the religion of Islam, and believes strongly in the education and empowerment of women, being a member of the United Nations Women Jordan Advisory Council. She is the recipient of the Jordan's Order of Al Hussein for Distinguished Contributions of the Second Class.
Catherine Waldby is an Australian academic, researcher and author. She is the Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and a visiting professor at King's College London.
Andrew Webster (1951–2021) was an English sociologist who was a professor of sociology at the University of York, where he established the Science and Technology Studies research unit. He studied the sociocultural and economic implications of introducing biomedical technologies, including stem cell research and regenerative medicine, into clinical settings.
