This is great news.
The organ donor wait list is 6-8 years for most organs (kidneys, livers, etc.).
Please be an organ donor.
U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
41–50 of 731 posts
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#42The poor guy, not only is he on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his days, but he's a new type of walking transgenic disease vector.
Lucky guy isn't dead!
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#43I wonder why a pig heart rather than one from another primate? The article mentions a baboon heart in an earlier attempt at xenotransplantation with an infant. Is a pig’s heart as, or more, compatible or is it more a matter of availability?
People love primates, specially big ones, and will get angry if in the future thousands of primates are used for organ harvest.
Pigs? People will make jokes like "If I pay for the heart transplant, do I get a free bacon?"
(Also, pigs have the correct size to get an organ usable in humans.)
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#44The pig was modified to remove presentation of immunogenic sugars on the cell surface. Unfortunately, the recipient needs to be on immunosuppressants the rest of their life. This rekindles discussions back in school about chimeras... in order for the organs to be immunocompatible, the donor needs to be partially human. What % is too human to harvest for organs? I suppose it's still too soon to answer such questions,…
> What % is too human to harvest for organs
I don't think it's really measurable, because a meaningful "%" implies a relatively context-free, relatively uniformly distributed importance to genetic sequence.
The most immunogenic sugar is glycolylneuraminic acid. Humans are incapable of making this sugar so it's immediately recognizable as alien by the human immune system.
You could in theory disable production of this sugar with a single base pair mutation which (if that's how you did it) would make this .000001% sequence difference extremely important over almost any other sequence point.
As a side note it's a matter of speculation that the lack of this sugar is an evasion mechanism for species-jumping flu.
Edit: tick thing was wrong, I had misremembered! Thank you smart reader who has since deleted their comment calling me out.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#45If pigs (or any animal) broaden the compatibility to other organs, what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any? On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat? On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing o…
Eat all the bacon you want, get heart disease, get new heart, eat more bacon.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#46If pigs (or any animal) broaden the compatibility to other organs, what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any? On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat? On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing o…
> On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?
Yes, in that it's morally superior to eating meat. Eating meat is mostly a nutritional luxury, but needing functioning organs is not. I'm a meat eater, but I imagine there are a number of vegetarians who would be okay with this sort of organ harvesting process.
Of course, if we end up able to grow organs in a lab environment instead of inside an animal, that's probably better for all involved.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#47Reminder: We've been replacing human heart VALVES with pig valves for a long time now. My grandmother lived for almost a decade after her replacement.
https://www.heart-valve-surgery.com/learning/pig-valve-repla...
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#48You might be asking, why a pig? I don't know, but forever ago I wrote software for a cardiovascular imaging lab and pigs were their primary test subjects. I was like, "why pigs?" and the PI was like, "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
What ... happens to the pigs who get accidental heart attacks? Are they ...? Do they ...?
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#49If pigs (or any animal) broaden the compatibility to other organs, what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any? On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat? On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing o…
> what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any?
We slaughter more than 100m pigs per year in the US for food. I don’t think a few more million are going to cause a moral dilemma.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#50If pigs (or any animal) broaden the compatibility to other organs, what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any? On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat? On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing o…
Don’t you know? Humans are pigs. /s
Interesting and wild hypothesis. http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html