Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 731 posts

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#61

Post by dexwiz »

tricky wrote: post #26

You 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."

Pigs are really common in biomedical testing. They are physically a similar size and weight to humans. They also reach maturity in about 6 months. Much cheaper to raise than primates, and more likely to get approval for testing. My friends in biomed grad school named one of theirs cyber pig because it has about 30 different experiments ran on it before it was killed, and afterwards it was portioned out for further tests.

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#64

Post by dukeofdoom »

So..."human pig hybrid".

How full is the tip jar for things Alex Jones was right about. If you grant him some room for hyperbole and exaggeration guy is a pretty good futurist. He brags about reading research papers all day long. Fascinating role as a court jester and modern day prophet.

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#65

Post by [deleted] »

dnautics wrote: post #44
woke_neoliberal wrote: post #35

The 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…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#68

Post by TulliusCicero »

dnautics wrote: post #57
robbiep wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not making the pig more human, they’re removing the markers of ‘foreign’ that would make it an immune target. So it’s a nice vanilla organ that minimally attracts the attention of the immune system.

On the other hand (and I am being flippant... Slightly) how do you know that removing this one gene doesn't unlock consciousness?

I mean pigs are already "conscious" on some level, I'm sure.

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#69

Post by dnautics »

Ensorceled wrote: post #47

Reminder: 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...

I could be wrong but I believe those valves are harvested for their cartilagenous (non-alive) components, their cells stripped, the valves throughly cleaned, and implanted in place. This is not quite the same as implanting an organ with live cells autonomously producing potential antigens on a daily basis

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#70

Post by serf »

dnautics wrote: post #57
robbiep wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not making the pig more human, they’re removing the markers of ‘foreign’ that would make it an immune target. So it’s a nice vanilla organ that minimally attracts the attention of the immune system.

On the other hand (and I am being flippant... Slightly) how do you know that removing this one gene doesn't unlock consciousness?

>how do you know that removing this one gene doesn't unlock consciousness?

i'm not the poster you're replying to, but for me the answer is this :

consciousness appears to me to be a constellation of traits rather than a trait itself that would be easily acquired with a genetic shift.

One could then say : 'What if the one we flip is the thing that finishes the constellation of traits that activates consciousness?' , and sadly I must confess that I believe that if that were to happen to an entity without sufficient communications methods that it would probably remain unknown and subject to whatever experiences whatever sensory organs it may have provides it, while we remain entirely unaware for some time.

Also, a point that I agree upon by the poster who replied to you with me ; we don't seem to hold conscious entities in very high regard -- only human ones.

Post reply on HN