Talking about male pregnancy
Reproductive technology has opened up a world of choices in how we go about becoming parents, but one part of the process that it hasn't changed is the fact that at some point a child has be carried by a woman. But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if both women and men could become pregnant? It's just that question writer Jen Graves asks in her piece "Getting Patrick Pregnant" for Seattle's The Stranger. In it, she examines the science that might make it possible for a man to carry a child -- but even more interestingly, she also explores the human side of this discussion by asking Patrick, her partner, whether he's willing to have their baby. Along the way, she gets the kind of reactions you'd expect... and a few that you probably wouldn't.
Are we ready for more-human animals?
Hank Greely and Francoise Baylis join us to talk about the ethics of creating animals that include human cells. Hank is a professor at the Stanford Law School, where he specializes in the legal implications of new biomedical technologies. He's also the lead author of a target article in the May 2007 AJOB Neuroscience looking at the ethical implications of proposed research that would create a mouse whose brain was constructed of human neurons. Francoise is a professor at Dalhousie University, where she founded the NovelTechEthics research team. And she also contributed an open peer commentary about the human neuron mouse to the May 2007 issue of AJOB.