Dr. Dhani Ram Baruah was a pioneer of pig heart transplants and tried this in 1997, and his patient lived for 7 days. However this was not received well and Dr Baruah was later arrested.
U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
511–520 of 731 posts
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am be responsible for purposefully creating a famine in India killing 3 million people and still be quoted as a badass in the future - Winston S. Churchill
I don't think the Bengal famine is that simple, certainly not to say "purposefully creating"...
Time and time again it has been proved and backed by research that it was indeed purposefully created. I don't understand why people aren't able to swallow that Churchill was responsible for the devastating famine. Its the same everywhere, even in r/history subreddit people just straight away deny Churchill was responsible for the famine. I understand that he is hailed as a hero for WW2 but he definitely has 3 million Indian's blood in his hand.
https://theprint.in/science/proved-by-science-winston-church...
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. Our bodies produce all of the enzymes, such as protease and lipase, necessary for the breakdown and absorption of meat. The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" and become "vegetarians" effectively masking o…
I agree with this take. Chimps kill and eat smaller monkeys all the time. If you watch any nature documentary you can see how ruthless animals are as it's all a survival game after all. I'm no biologist but the empathy / sympathy part also seems to be an evolved trait. It should bring stability to a social group and reduce injuries due to needless in-fighting which effectively ensures better survival as a group.
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Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. Our bodies produce all of the enzymes, such as protease and lipase, necessary for the breakdown and absorption of meat. The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" and become "vegetarians" effectively masking o…
No, we can eat meat but we are by no means obligate carnivores like cats are.
A cat will die on a no-meat diet, while we can easily live on plants alone.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#515Earlier 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.
Wishing you had never been born is one thing, wishing someone/something else had never been born is not a response of empathy but rather personal guilt.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#516Earlier 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.
"In 2020.. Total commercial hog slaughter was 131.563 million head" - US FDA Report. I appreciate your sentiment, but if you would like to direct effort toward this cause, perhaps the food industry would be a better starting point.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#517You 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 does PI stand for here?
Principal Investigator, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. Our bodies produce all of the enzymes, such as protease and lipase, necessary for the breakdown and absorption of meat. The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" and become "vegetarians" effectively masking o…
Cats are "biologically designed to kill and eat flesh" but have you ever seen
what cats do to the animals they capture for food? On the other hand, humans
don't, as a rule torture our food and we usually kill our food before we eat it.
Not all meat-eating animals have the same kind of behaviour toward their prey.
Humans are "biologically designed" to love other animals and care for them. Not in an Elmyra Duff kind of way, but in the way that has allowed us to tame and domesticate the wild ancestors of the animals we still live with. In the same way that our animals have a docile and calm nature that allows them to be domesticated, we have a caring and loving nature that allows us to domesticate them. We are not lions. A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day. Without our love for animals, which is just as ingrained into us as our love of eating their flesh, we wouldn't be who we are today, our civilisation wouldn't be what it is today, our bodies and brains wouldn't be what they are today.
Those animals have given us so much, and they will continue to give us even more. The least we can do is to treat them with respect and ensure they have a dignified life and a dignified death.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I felt that the ethics board part was implied. In western universities it's very hard to do animal testing. No one just strolls down to Pets Mart and picks up some mice. The Animal Welfare Act governs animal testing in the United States, and school risk funding if they don't follow the law. To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of the specific programs. I just know they had to present and get their pr…
I know University of Calgary had a bio professor who got in hot water for abusing animals (essentially: he encouraged his student to not anaesthetize animals before surgery to fudge numbers). So there are definitely grad students who will happily torture animals if it can help their career.
Damn, they require you to tell them how many mice you've got so you can get that many anaesthesis doses? That rule wasn't thought through.
Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
It means that our ancestors happened to survive by eating meat, among other things, and produced us. Nothing more.
There's more. It means the way you think, your health and your physical features are all naturally designed to help you obtain meat (and veggies).
Not necessarily. We have evolved features that are beneficial to us as well as those that just happened and wasn’t too detrimental nor useful. We are not the “perfect creature”.
It is no longer thought to be a rudimentary organ but let me use it as an example: our appendix could very well serve no purpose, but it was not too detrimental (we didn’t get appendicitis in great enough numbers) so it remained.
While being able to digest meat is likely beneficial (though actually it is very easy to consume meat, especially cooked one compared to raw vegetables — just look at a cow’s digestive track), it doesn’t mean that we are made for that. A horse will gladly eat a small chicken for extra protein if it wanders to it (look up on YouTube)