Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

Did the mother have HIV?

I think the idea was that, yeah, to avoid maternal transmission to the fetus, you would not have that.

But there are other ways in which that can actually be avoided.

So in this case, it was not perhaps the best choice of a disease to correct.

And I think that's why the scientific community has been quite outraged by both, I guess, the rationale and the way the experiment was done, which was not following, certainly,

Yeah.

So we think a lot about like the ethical issues and we think this as a group at Stanford, that's part of like my center.

We have like Ken Greeley, who's a professor of law and an ethicist.

But actually we've engaged many ethicists, sociologists or religions.

We're actually going to have the first meeting at Asilomar this November on the ethics of neuro-organoids, assembloids and their transplantation.

And there are various ways of classifying the ethical issues.

The way I think about it is that on one hand, there are ethical issues that are related to the cells.

We are taking cells from a human.

And so you expect that you have received proper consent for the use of those cells, whatever that is.

On the other hand, if, for instance, you put them into an animal, then there are ethical issues related to that animal.

Are you doing any harm?

How do we manage pain in that animal that has been transplanted?

And then there are sort of like issues that are the interface between the two.

So, for instance, are there any emergent properties?

that are arising at one point, whether they're like in a dish or maybe perhaps in an animal.