Beagle 0.1.3 is out. It’s mostly a bug fix release, with the exception of the kick ass new python bindings. Here is a neat little example script which runs a search and prints the results.
Lately, there have been a lot of articles in various places about the recent face transplant that took place in France. The articles mention that while we’ve had the technology to do this for a few years, that a procedure had never been performed for “ethical reasons” and raise serious “ethical concerns.” I’ve tried discussing this with a few of my friends, but we’re all stumped. What are the ethical implications of a face transplant? I don’t get it. The donor is already dead, so that’s not it. It’s not simple cosmetic surgery, it’s a freaking face transplant. It’s major surgery. You could die. Your body could reject it. And you will have to take immunosuppressant drugs every day for the rest of your life. So I doubt there’s going to be a rash of face transplants in America, even in LA. Maybe you could argue that it should only be performed in a life-or-death situation, but again, it’s such a severe procedure that it would take someone who, although they wouldn’t die, had very serious quality of life issues to undergo the surgery in the first place. This was apparently the case for the woman who received it, who was very badly disfigured by a dog attack. She was well informed before the surgery, so what’s the big deal?
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] Joe Shaw has been talking about the recent first face transplant operation. As he notes, the technology and skill to perform such an operation has been around for a while, but it has not been done before due to “ethical issues.” Unfortunately, the CNN article he links to has little information on what these issues are, which makes things somewhat confusing. The BBC has better coverage of this, and the issues were discussed in the Slashdot comments. Basically, it seems to come down to three major issues: [...]