Table 3 Example Quotes of Social/Ethical Issues Discussed in the Media Sample
From: Media portrayal of ethical and social issues in brain organoid research
Social/Ethical Issues | Quotations from Media Sample Texts |
|---|---|
Moral Consideration of Organoid | "Through this line of thinking, if minibrains developed sentient capacities similar to "real" brains, they could, in essence, hold the same consciousness of humans and thus potentially have human rights" (source 61). |
Artificial Consciousness | "Is it possible that an organoid far off in the future could develop something that looks like consciousness or any kind of sentience, the ability to feel something like pain or experience anything" (source 116). |
Animal “Humanization” | "once the door is open, you can come to all sorts of scenarios including the 100 per cent humanisation of an animal's brain, and all the ethical concerns that raises" (source 37). |
Ownership | “'If I take a snippet of cells from your arm, make stem cells, and make an organoid in a dish, do you still own it? Does my lab? My university?'" (source 124). |
Control of Technology | “It might be that the technology is not ready yet, or we don't know how to control the technology" (source 126). |
Accuracy of Models | “Another central issue is... how true to life an in vitro model of human development needs to be in order to be both scientifically valuable and ethically acceptable" (source 85). |
Stem Cell Research | "There are concerns that, as lab-grown cultures become increasingly indistinguishable from a human brain, researchers could violate ethical codes of conduct around stem cell experimentation" (source 53). |
Animal Experimentation | “More sophisticated in-vitro models could replace the need to have animal models or human foetal tissue in future research" (source 53). |
Human Experimentation | “The line between research on organoids and human experimentation, however, is unclear and remains to be established" (source 70). |
Suffering from Neurologic Disease/Disorders | "there is a mandate to keep pushing, not least because of what it might mean to the world at large: more diseases combated, more treatments developed, more lives saved and, above all, a fuller glimpse of a dauntingly complex organ" (source 94). |