Faculty Bibliography

The harvesting and transplantation of organs from genetically altered pigs has sparked an escalating debate within the transplant community worldwide. The ethical and moral arguments against using another life form to save humans--as well as using humans for experimentation--run side by side with the potential medical considerations of inadvertently unleashing heretofore unknown virulent agents on the public. Nonetheless, the ethical case against xenografting, while compelling and worthy of more public and expert debate and discussion, is not persuasive. Genetically altered pigs might not be able to save human lives at present, but the time has come to take a tentative step to see whether they can in the future.

Finally, the Food and Drug Administration has approved an emergency contraception kit, using the same pills now used for birth control. The kit -- marketed by Gynetics Inc., of Somerville, N.J. - - has a pregnancy test that a woman must use first since, if she is already pregnant, emergency contraception will do nothing to change that. But if she is not yet pregnant, emergency contraception will cut the chance of becoming pregnant after unprotected sexual intercourse from 8 percent to 2 percent

Granted, when the subject is the love life of a president, a British princess or an underage prostitute on one of the TV tabloid shows, we cannot shut up. But that is talk about strangers whose habits, peccadilloes and moral failings have no immediate bearing on what we do in our own bedrooms. When the conversation turns to our own sex lives, to the sexuality of our spouses, children and siblings, we have much less to say

HEALTH AND Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala has proposed a change in the regulations governing who gets a transplant. If her proposal becomes law, organs would be issued from a single national waiting list, with the sickest patients getting top priority

The benefits of rushing to attempt human cloning are far harder to see. So it is clear what the goal of regulation and legislation ought to be: to buy us the time to ensure the safety and proper oversight of human-cloning work. Put a moratorium of a few years on any effort to create a human being by means of cloning

Richard Seed, the retired physicist who scared the nation to death earlier this month with his talk of creating a brave new biological world, has inadvertently become the poster boy for regulating cloning