By Rose Bowen
The pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson became the first in the drug industry to create a Bioethics panel of ethicists, doctors and patient advocates to respond to requests for access to experimental medicines, called “compassionate use.” This is only applicable to investigational drugs, or drugs that have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Arthur Caplan, Director of the NYU Division of Medical Ethics, …

By Michael Lausberg
Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero claims to have found a procedure to realize a project in transplant surgery that may strike us as something more fitting for a science fiction movie than today’s reality. He announced that a full body transplant could be possible in the next two years. In a full body transplant, the head of a living person would be transplanted to a donor cadaver’s body; such …

By Caroline Song
A 44-year-old male double-lung transplant patient at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, passed away following complications 40 days after his procedure.
His death was brought on by hyperammonemia, a state of incredibly high levels of ammonia in the blood. High levels of ammonia lead to brain swelling, which causes the patient to slip into a coma and expire soon after.
A new study has found that a type of …