Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, VA, USA.
Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law, Leuven, Belgium.
Xenotransplantation. 2017 Jul;24(4). doi: 10.1111/xen.12317. Epub 2017 Jul 5.
A recently published article in the journal Cell by scientists from the Salk Institute highlighted the successful integration of stem cells from humans in pig embryos. This marks the first step toward the goal of growing human organs in animals for transplantation. There has, to date, been no research performed on the presentation of this breakthrough in the media. We thus assessed early newspaper coverage of the chimera study, looking into the descriptions as well as the benefits and concerns raised by the study mentioned by newspaper sources.
We looked at newspaper coverage of the human-pig chimera study in the two weeks after the publication of the article describing the breakthrough in Cell. This time period spanned from January 26 to February 9, 2017. We used the LexisNexis Academic database and identified articles using the search string "hybrid OR chimera AND pig OR human OR embryo." The relevant articles were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Two researchers openly coded the articles independently using themes that emerged from the raw texts.
Our search yielded 31 unique articles, after extensive screening for relevance and duplicates. Through our analysis, we were able to identify several themes in a majority of the texts. Almost every article gave descriptive information about the chimera experiment with details about the study findings. All of the articles mentioned the benefits of the study, citing both immediate- and long-term goals, which included creating transplantable human organs, disease and drug development, and personalized medicine, among others. Some of the articles highlighted some ethical, social, and health concerns that the study and its future implications pose. Many of the articles also offered reassurances over the concerns brought up by the experiment.
Our results appeared to align with similar research performed on the media representation of sensitive scientific news coverage. We also explored the inconsistency between the tone of the titles and the articles that followed. However, it is still too early to speculate what impact the media will play in the public perception of this particular research.
最近，索尔克研究所的科学家在《细胞》杂志上发表的一篇文章强调了人类干细胞在猪胚胎中的成功整合。这标志着朝着在动物体内生长用于移植的人类器官这一目标迈出了第一步。迄今为止，媒体对这一突破没有进行任何研究。因此，我们评估了媒体对嵌合体研究的早期报道，研究了报纸来源提到的该研究的描述以及该研究带来的益处和关注。
我们在描述 Cell 突破性研究的文章发表后的两周内，即 2017 年 1 月 26 日至 2 月 9 日，查看了有关人类-猪嵌合体研究的报纸报道。我们使用 LexisNexis Academic 数据库，并使用搜索字符串“hybrid 或 chimera 和 pig 或 human 或 embryo”来识别文章。使用定性内容分析法分析了相关文章。两名研究人员使用从原始文本中出现的主题，独立地对文章进行了开放式编码。
经过广泛的筛选，我们从 31 篇独特的文章中找到了 31 篇文章。通过我们的分析，我们能够识别出大多数文章中的几个主题。几乎每篇文章都提供了有关嵌合体实验的描述性信息，包括研究结果的细节。所有文章都提到了研究的益处，列举了直接和长期目标，包括创造可移植的人类器官、疾病和药物开发以及个性化医疗等。一些文章强调了该研究及其未来影响所带来的一些伦理、社会和健康方面的担忧。许多文章还对实验引起的担忧表示了安抚。
我们的结果似乎与对敏感科学新闻报道的媒体报道的类似研究一致。我们还探讨了标题和后续文章之间的语气不一致。然而，现在还为时过早，无法推测媒体将在公众对这项特定研究的看法中发挥什么作用。
