playing god?

<p>When Kristelle and Evan Shulman lose their young son Noah to a rare mitochondrial disease, they are told they may never be able to have a healthy biologically related child. Then they discover mitochondrial...

<p>Humanity is actively working towards a mission to Mars. When astronauts like Bernard Harris leave Earth, they accept risk as part of the mission. But a journey to Mars would push that risk into entirely new...

<p>When journalist Esmé Deprez receives a text from her father, Ron Deprez, asking for help to die, she enters one of the most ethically fraught spaces in modern medicine: Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). This episode...

<p>Life and death decisions. Difficult tradeoffs. “playing god?” explores ethical dilemmas in health and medicine through the first-person stories of people who have lived them. Brought to you by the...

<p>Season Two of playing god? is coming soon. Here's a preview of what's in the works.</p>

<p>Back in the 1960s, a committee of seven Seattle residents met regularly to decide which patients with chronic kidney disease were “worthy” of life-saving dialysis. Whoever wasn’t selected by the committee would...

<p>In this episode we head into the future to learn about a controversial technology that could change the face of reproduction. Researchers are developing a technology called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), which can...

<p>Cheryl Yoder’s son Jase, was born with an incurable rare disease called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which meant he was unlikely to live beyond two years old. Jase managed to get a spot in a clinical trial for an...

<p>For years Brandy Ellis had tried everything to treat depression but nothing worked. Then one day she heard about something called deep brain stimulation, a brain implant that treats some neurological conditions. This...

<p>When Laurie Strongin’s son Henry was born with the rare, often fatal disease of Fanconi anemia, doctors told her that the best way to save his life was with an umbilical cord blood transplant from a genetically...

<p>Jen Dingle yearned to get pregnant and have children, but there was one problem: she was born without a uterus. So when she was ready to have children she was desperate to find a way to do it. That’s when she learned...

<p>It can take years to get to the top of the waiting list for a donated kidney in the U.S. So when Sally Satel found out she’d need a kidney transplant, she wondered why she couldn’t just buy one. We’ll hear from a...

<p>One day, when she was only 39, bar manager Jamie Imhof collapsed. While she lay in a coma, doctors told her family that they knew how to save her life: she needed an immediate liver transplant. But, transplant...

<p>When a 13 year-old girl from Oakland named Jahi McMath was pronounced brain dead after a surgical complication in 2013, California issued her a death certificate. Five years later, she received a second death...

<p>While Andrea Rubin lay unconscious and severely burned after a car fire, her father told doctors to do everything they could to keep her alive. She would need many surgeries. Her quality of life wouldn’t be the same...