Islet Xeno/transplantation and the risk of contagion: local responses from Canada and Australia to an emerging global technoscience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper situates the public debate over the use of living animal organs and tissue for human therapies within the history of experimental islet transplantation. Specifically, the paper compares and contrasts the Canadian and Australian responses on xenotransplantation to consider what lessons can be learnt about the regulation of a complex and controversial biotechnology. Sobbrio and Jorqui described public engagement on xenotransplantation in these countries as 'important forms of experimental democracy.' While Canada experimented with a novel nation-wide public consultation, Australia sought public input within the context of a national inquiry. In both instances, the outcome was a temporary moratorium on all forms of clinical xenotransplantation comparable to the policies adopted in some European countries. In addition, the Australian xenotransplantation ban coincided with a temporary global ban on experimental islet allotransplantation in 2007. Through historical and comparative research, this paper investigates how public controversies over organ and tissue transplantation can inform our understanding of the mediation of interspeciality and the regulation of a highly contested technoscience. It offers an alternative perspective on the xenotransplantation controversy by exploring the ways in which coinciding moratoriums on islet allograft and xenograft challenge, complicate and confound our assumptions regarding the relationships between human and animal, between routine surgery and clinical experimentation, between biomedical science and social science, and between disease risks and material contagion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".