You may want to set your Tivo to this Friday at 1 p.m. when local PBS channel KUHTDT-TV (check your local PBS station for the time) will rebroadcast the excellent PBS American Experience series segment that ran last night entitled The Boy in the Bubble, which focuses on the difficult ethical issues raised by the medical treatment of the late Houstonian David Vetter (a/k/a the “bubble boy”), who had severe combined immunodeficiency and lived inside a sterile plastic chamber for his 12 year life:

When David Vetter died at the age of 12, he was already world famous: the boy in the plastic bubble. Mythologized as the plucky, handsome child who had defied the odds, his life story is in fact even more dramatic. It is a tragic tale that pits ambitious doctors against a bewildered, frightened young couple; it is a story of unendingly committed caregivers and resourceful scientists on the cutting edge of medical research. This American Experience raises some of the most difficult ethical questions of our age. Did doctors, in a rush to save a child, condemn the boy to a life not worth living? Did they, in the end, effectively decide how to kill him?

Here is a Steve McVicker/Houston Press story from nine years ago that raises many of the same questions as those addressed in the PBS show.