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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...
May I ask how much did it cost and did insurance cover it?
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."
I heard they are humanized 'pigs'. Ie. engineered so their organs don't trigger our immune system. Not sure how true is this, or it is just a myth.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/alpha... and https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/retur... are good listens on the subject.
In particular from the second one:
> SOREN: Which brings me back to that little part of the article that piqued my interest in the beginning, because the pig that they got the kidney from to do this was a very special pig. Normally, pigs and other mammals that aren't primates have a sugar in their body that our bodies don't have, and so we don't like it or see it as foreign. And that's why usually an organ from another animal would get rejected. But this pig had been genetically modified. It had had the gene that makes that sugar removed, so it didn't have that sugar. Which is part of the reason this worked. And that sugar just so happens to be called "alpha-gal."
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,…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?' , a…
If 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 harvesti…
I've teetered on staying committed to veganism for ethical reasons, and have spent time on and off with vegan diets. I don't at all think (nor do I think most vegans think [see disclaimer]) that pigs are worthy of equal moral consideration as humans. I, along with most humans, think that pigs as well as other animals are worthy of some level of moral consideration. Most would be rightfully outraged at the torture of animals for fun, for instance.
Vegans take it a small step further, the moral consideration of a pig outweighs the pleasure provided to our taste buds by consuming their flesh. The prior two examples of consumption and torture, while vastly different, are also on a whole different level than raising pigs to save human lives. If you agree that pigs and humans are NOT morally equivalent (which is most people, including most vegans [see disclaimer],) then I think you are committed to the idea that it is imperative to raise and kill pigs to save human lives.
[Disclaimer: neither vegans or non-vegans are monoliths. There are countless ethical, religious, and practical frameworks one will employ to arrive at any particular ethical position.]
When I was a teenager there was a novel adapted for TV by the BBC called “Pig Heart Boy”. It explored the emotional impact of this type of procedure on a teenager and the response from the public, both good and bad. I don’t remember much about it but it looks like it won a BAFTA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Heart_Boy
We're getting good at building artificial nonorganic heart, still a bit away from growing conventional hearts. I wonder how these future options intersect, whether one will win out over another, or we will be having hybrids? Electromagnetic motors work fine, but a big issue with them is the method of powering them and maybe biocompatibility issue. Normal organic hearts don't have this disadvantage but their downside…