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U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

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

#501

Post by jhgb »

fortran77 wrote: post #170
jhgb wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rationalize all you want, but you can't reason religious people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. If these people can be convinced that they shouldn't be doing thing XYZ on the order of an omnipotent being that nobody has ever seen, chances seem to be even between them accepting exceptions from this order and them rejecting these exceptions. After all, you see other people rejecting/ignoring o…

> reason religious people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. Please don't presume things about religious people, especially since you're not one yourself.

That is not a presumption -- it's a statement of fact.

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

#502

Post by scotty79 »

Sporktacular wrote: post #230
dexwiz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature. Weirder how it can be said without a sympathetic or concerned response. I hope we can someday move beyond seeing animals as a mere resource.

I deal with this same way I deal with not being vegetarian. I just accept that I am not a good man.

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

#503

Post by nsonha »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #500
nsonha wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol that's it? If they said something like "how you feel about it is inconsequential" I would accept it as a pragmatic/stoic way to look at it. There is no way a life in a lab can be even remotely good, well cared or not, but it's hard to compare when a typical life of a pig ends with being slaughtered, only to end up expired pieces of meat most of the times.

How do you think a life of a pig would end if it wasn't being slaughtered? Most likely it would be half-eaten alive by a predator and the rest left to rot or be taken by scavengers. The same thing will happen now (the expired pieces of meat will mostly become food for insect larvae) except it's a human doing the slaughtering and the animal is killed before being eaten.

the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing, if wasn't for human to have so much meat on display that it gets expired.

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

#505

Post by jhgb »

mardifoufs wrote: post #172
jhgb wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rationalize all you want, but you can't reason religious people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. If these people can be convinced that they shouldn't be doing thing XYZ on the order of an omnipotent being that nobody has ever seen, chances seem to be even between them accepting exceptions from this order and them rejecting these exceptions. After all, you see other people rejecting/ignoring o…

It's not rationalization, I know some religions have a pretty rigid structure that you need to rationalize your way around when it comes to medical exceptions to religious rules but... Islam is not one of them. Maybe some folk belief might be a source of hesitation in this case but in islam the jurisprudence is very clear and no scholar would really argue otherwise. Just to give an example, even ISIS allowed alcohol…

But you're still arguing about perfectly following a set of arbitrary rules. The very fact that they're arbitrary means you'll get people who'll make up arbitrary religious rules for themselves (and they will perfectly follow those) and the "beliefs of the different islamic branches/sects/schools" will be no more relevant for the beliefs of an individual than a codified national language is for some people's idiolects.

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

#506

Post by perlgeek »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #201
dnautics wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would artificial valves then not work as well or even better?

Artificial valves last roughly 10 years, typically. Sometimes more. You have to take antibiotics at the slightest sign of any infection, to avoid infectious settlement of the valve.

A family member got a "tissue engineered" valve a few years ago, so the cells (from a human valve, salvaged from the recipient of a heart transplant) were removed, and can be colonized by body cells, very mild to non-existent rejection. This seems to be a permanent solution.

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

#507

Post by saagarjha »

deltaonefour wrote: post #476
bayesian_horse wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are also designed not to harm your fellow beings. That may sound like a contradiction, but it's just the "fellow beings" parts that is culturally or individually changed. There have been soldiers who went to war who couldn't shoot their enemies, even though they might even have "wanted" to. Compassion seems to be a very fundamental building block of the Human mind.

You are designed to survive. If that survival involves harming people than that is what will occur. You are also designed to fuck a woman and make her pregnant and many men will fulfill this goal at any cost. Hence why rape exists.

Rape exists independently of the desire to make women pregnant. Quite frankly, bringing it up here as something that humans were “designed” to do and then arguing that we repress ourselves in various ways by not perpetuating rape (or being vegetarian) does not really help your point.

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

#508

Post by bool3max »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #321
dexwiz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

truly disgustingly cruel how humans treat other sentient beings as irrelevant and inanimate. as a species, we kinda are underperforming the compassion we are capable of, except in self serving situations.

It's a pig.

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

#509

Post by jakuboboza »

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 also used for vaccine testing. Maybe because their immune system is similar to humans. I wonder if man-bear-pig could happen if pigs would develop bigger more folded brains.

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

#510

Post by cheese_goddess »

nsonha wrote: post #503
cheese_goddess wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think a life of a pig would end if it wasn't being slaughtered? Most likely it would be half-eaten alive by a predator and the rest left to rot or be taken by scavengers. The same thing will happen now (the expired pieces of meat will mostly become food for insect larvae) except it's a human doing the slaughtering and the animal is killed before being eaten.

the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing, if wasn't for human to have so much meat on display that it gets expired.

Sorry, I didn't understand what you mean. Can you type more carefully? English is not my first language and I can't guess what you're trying to say.
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