Here's a special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, exploring the promise and peril of refrigeration (as applied e.g. to organ transplantation).
Here's how the introduction to the issue begins:
" Human beings depend on biological materials for survival — everything from food to medical interventions such as organ transplantation, to the environments in which we live. So it is no surprise that techniques to avoid the deterioration of biological materials have been used since ancient times.Reference Knorr and Augustin1 Cooling is one of the oldest techniques. Indeed, most of us now live with a cooling machine — a refrigerator — in our kitchens. But the function of those machines is primarily to retard the spoilage of materials that are already in the process of disintegrating: fruit that has already been harvested, meat from beef and chickens already slaughtered, and milk already derived from cows.
Beginning in the mid-20th century, scientists began to develop techniques for cryopreservation with more ambitious goals in mind. Instead of merely slowing the deterioration of biological materials, techniques could be developed to preserve living materials for prolonged periods of time and then allow their revival and use at a future time and place. An early application was cryopreservation of sperm (both human and animal), allowing sperm banking and later use.Reference Walters, Pacey and Tomlinson2 Yet conventional cryopreservation had its limits. Prolonged preservation of solid organs for transplantation was among the applications that proved elusive."
Emerging Technologies to Stop Biological Time: The Ethical, Legal & Policy Challenges of Advanced Biopreservation Volume 52 - Issue 3 - Fall 2024
Latest issue of Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
Introduction
Symposium Articles
#####
Earlier post (on what turns out to have been a seminal paper: "Since Giwa and colleagues reviewed the emerging field of biopreservation in biomedicine in 2017, progress has been swift."):
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment