Ethical Considerations
Maria-Stella Portelli
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Artificial 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.
Bioartificial 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 artificial device to replace a missing part of
the body.
Ref: ‘Prostheses and Artificial 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
Doctors discovered a golf-ball-size tumour growing into Mr
Beyene’s 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 readymade replacement organs - livers, kidneys, even hearts - built in the
laboratory.
 In Beyene’s 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 body’s 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?