Much is recently being made about pre-natal gene editing in China by He. There were ethical concerns with the first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in South Africa on December 3, 1967, and, with the first cloned sheep, Dolly.
Not having a human donor heart available, James D. Hardy of the University of Mississippi Medical Center transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee into the chest of a dying Boyd Rush in the early morning of Jan. 24, 1964. Hardy used a defibrillator to shock the heart to restart beating. This heart did beat in Rush's chest for 60 to 90 minutes (sources differ), and then Rush died without regaining consciousness. Although Hardy was a respected surgeon who had performed the world's first human-to-human lung transplant a year earlier, author Donald McRae states that Hardy could feel the "icy disdain" from fellow surgeons at the Sixth International Transplantation Conference several weeks after this attempt with the chimpanzee heart. (Source: Wikipedia)
Ethics applies universally, not selectively, as many would have us believe. There is no International outcry when doctors in the US of A, carrying out abortions, are shot dead by anti-abortionists. Or when more than three fertilized embryos were/are implanted in IVF in one go? After all, life starts in the embryo, or does it not?
Bias, jealousy, and rivalry come in various forms, but are best covered under the guise of ethics.
Is ethics a battle between the have and have-not or those who can and cannot or those who did and did not?
Procedure is primary. It does not matter what you do, it is how you do it. – Artemis Ward
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