When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, researchers announced they had created the first living robot.

These so-called “xenobots” are programmable organisms created from the stem cells of African clawed frog embryos — or Xenopus laevis. Just two years later, researchers announced that xenobots were spontaneously reproducing. This shocking and concerning news was not widely covered except by scientific publications and a social media post by Joe Rogan. Rather than solely leaving important moral and ethical implications such as this one to scientists, we need to bring them into the public discourse.