2023, Vol.26, No.1

Korean Journal of Medical Ethics 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.21

pISSN : 2005-8284 / eISSN : 2234-3598
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medethics

Worldwide, organoids are being used in an increasing range and variety of research contexts, including certain forms of drug testing and transplantation research. In Korea, however, the ethical issues raised by organoid research have received little attention and there are currently no laws or regulations governing this form of research. Accordingly, this study was conducted to identify and examine the ethical challenges for organoid research. The article is structured as follows: Section 2 identifies the organs that can be used in organoid research; Section 3 discusses the precautions for cell donation procedures for organoid research, including the “contents and scope of informed consent,” “cell donor autonomy,” and the “protection of cell donor’s genetic information.” Section 4 examines the ethical challenges of drug testing, patents and commercial uses of organoid research, and the development of organoids for transplantation.

The head of South Korea’s COVID-19 policy committee has argued that it is unfair that individuals who choose not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 receive public funding for medical treatment related to COVID-19. Although these remarks were not connected to any change in the country’s COVID-19 policies, it is important, for both theoretical and practical reasons, to address the justifiability of a policy that would make unvaccinated individuals pay for their own COVID-19-related medical treatment. This article argues that it would be difficult to justify such a policy even from the standpoint of luck egalitarianism, which holds that it is fair for some to be worse off than others if the inequality in question is the result of choices those individuals made. Although it is often assumed that luck egalitarians would approve of policies that denied COVID-19-related medical treatment to individuals who choose not to vaccinate, this article shows that this assumption is not necessarily right. Additionally, this article also clarifies common misunderstandings of luck egalitarianism at the theoretical level.

This article considers the question of why it is difficult to adopt a One Health approach to optimizing health despite its importance and argues that ecological thinking is necessary for the practice of One Health. Although from an environmental perspective humans and non-humans co-exist in a complex set of relationships, social systems tend to treat humans, animals, and the environment as distinct entities. Accordingly, Niklas Luhmann attributes ecological problems, at least in part, to society itself and not merely to political or economic failures or moral shortcomings. However, while social systems such as the economy, science, politics, and education, are in an important sense closed, they can also be responsive to each other through One Health communication. Above all, in order for One Health to operate within these social systems there is a social need for ecological thinking that the human body is inseparable from the material world, biological life, ecosystems, biomaterials, and human-made materials.