Role-play – ethics and pig cell transplants
In this activity, students use role-playing to explore different stakeholders’ perspectives on the issue of using pig cells to treat type 1 diabetes. Transplanting pig cells into humans is a type of xenotransplantation, which raises ethical issues about animal welfare, individual rights and risk of spreading disease. Peoples’ views will be influenced by their cultural, spiritual and religious perspectives.
Purpose
By the end of this activity, students should be able to:
present and justify the views of a given stakeholder group on pig cell transplants.
use a role-playing scenario to highlight the diversity of issues raised by people for and against pig cell transplants.
understand that ethical issues are often complex, with no right answer, but ethical deliberation can help us to make informed, justified decisions.
Pig cell transplants and PERV
Bob Elliott from Living Cell Technologies (LCT) explains why pig to human transplants, or xenotransplants, were banned in 1997 and the research since then that has allowed transplants to continue.
Select here for transcript, questions to consider, teaching points and copyright information.
Keywords
xenotransplantation, ethics, pig cells, diabetes, risks, benefits.
Related content
Using animal cells to treat human disease raises many ethical issues. Whether people think that the benefits of this technology outweigh the risks is largely influenced by their needs and their cultural, religious or spiritual views of the world.
The two articles below introduce the range of resources we have on:
The Ethics thinking toolkit uses common ethical frameworks to help you explore ethical decision-making and judgements with your students. For more about ethical frameworks and teaching ethical thinking, see Frameworks for ethical analysis and Teaching ethics.
Useful links
A panel of experts on xenotransplantation discusses xenotransplantation and LCT trials in New Zealand in 2009. See this Science Media Centre article, which includes links to audio files.
New Zealand Herald articles:
Pig-cell transplants today means lollipops tomorrow, (22 October 2008)
Diabetes patient speaks out on pig-cell trial, (27 April 2010)
