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

541–550 of 731 posts

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

#541

Post by libertine »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #412
graderjs wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird that these statements are made (and I don't mean by you, it's a trope to make them by people in general in discussions like this, I'm not picking you out) that it somehow justifies, or ameliorates, the awfulness of experimenting then dissecting (as someone said) a helpless intelligent creature. I think these statements justify animal trials and using it to benefit humans definitely. But it doesn't justify or ma…

If you can accept humans can eat helpless intelligent creatures, then the fact we perform ethics-reviewed anesthetised procedures and later dissect the same animals really shouldn't keep you up at night.

>If you can accept humans can eat helpless intelligent creatures

Not only we can heat... we stuff our faces into it several times a day and we keep rearranging the forms we eat it.

We even make an effort to make it more enticing to children in the form of small golden nuggets like it's some sort of a treasure of flavor.

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

#543

Post by csee »

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 hope so too, but let's start with the highest impact interventions like stopping the gassing of pigs with CO2 which causes immense pain at an extremely large scale.

It's upsetting in an absolute sense that we experiment on pigs like this, but at least that was only 1 pig and the benefits of that would be much more than if it was just used for food.

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

#544

Post by kaba0 »

arcticbull wrote: post #210
valachio wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not gloating. I genuinely enjoy eating pork and meat in general. It's the most nutritious food a human can eat in my humble opinion. I hold no shame in eating and enjoying meat. If I was a scientist and a piggie died as part of an experiment or whatever. I would do my best to eat the piggie and not let any part of it end up in the trash and going to waste.

> It's the most nutritious food a human can eat in my humble opinion. Citation needed on this one. I'm curious.

If parent means nutritious as rich in energy than it has plenty of calories indeed (though sugary drinks will easily beat it)

If they mean as in provides many kind of nutrition, it is still false as it is mostly fat and protein. It is quite homogenous to be called nutritious.

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

#545

Post by csee »

sailfast wrote: post #356
mise_en_place wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s weird at all. If a million people were to die of COVID tomorrow, I wouldn’t really care emotionally. They all had their own life narratives, emotions and intelligence. Yet it wouldn’t phase me one bit. Perhaps intellectually I would have some compassion for them, and would hope they didn’t suffer. On the other hand, if a close relative or friend dies, I would mourn them immensely. Similarly, if I h…

A MILLION people? Not one bit? "Perhaps intellectually I would have some compassion for them?" I guess you're proving Stalin (paraphrasing Tucholsky?[0]) was right? "The death of one is a tragedy, but the death of millions, a statistic. [0] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0603/Political-m...

Isn't this normal? We didn't evolve to feel much compassion in the abstract for people outside of our group, especially not if there aren't visual or auditory cues that they're suffering.

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

#546

Post by csee »

mdorazio wrote: post #339
kortex wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, "pigs are smarter than dogs" is gonna need a Citation Needed. I don't doubt some pigs are smarter than some dogs, and maybe they are comparable on average, but I'd put money on any of the working breed dogs over pigs. ("smarter" being general intelligence, reasoning, working memory, and inference. There might be some specific tasks pigs excel at, but that is different than measuring "smarts")

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c#page-1 Good summary of findings there. You can draw your own conclusions - it's probably case-dependent.

Smarter isn't that morally relevant. Their capacity to suffer is. Maybe smart is a proxy for that, but I highly doubt it's a good one, given that our prefrontal cortex was a modular attachment to a system capable of suffering which evolved a long time ago.

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

#547

Post by csee »

loeg wrote: post #319
JCharante wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is intelligence really a good reason to discriminate though? Isn't that what *ists used to say about other groups of people? Do we experiment on people with learning disorders? (Well I think they used to but they stopped)

By that line of reasoning, you shouldn't eat plants, either.

Plants probably can't suffer. Pigs probably can.

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

#548

Post by bayesian_horse »

saagarjha wrote: post #507
deltaonefour wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would not be a counter argument, as OP seems to labor on the simplified assumption that sexual desire has evolved to ensure procreation, and then it doesn't really matter if you intend to father offspring or just to fulfill that desire.

But it's not that easy, because sexual desire in Humans (and many animal species) is way more complicated than ensuring conception.

And more importantly, rape is more complicated than sexual desire. It often isn't about the sex. And I agree that the referring to biological urges when talking about rape is somehow releasing the perpetrator of some of the guilt. It is always also a lack of judgement, empathy, self control and so on. Nothing except very rare brain disorders can make someone a rapist unless he chooses to be.

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

#549

Post by kaba0 »

jhgb wrote: post #505
mardifoufs wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 idiolec…

They are not arbitrary though. Historic, perhaps. E.g. pork was disallowed as far as I know due to the spread of diseases from bad conservation techniques at the time.

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

#550

Post by technothrasher »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #518
deltaonefour wrote: post #353

Earlier 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…

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…

> A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day.

What a simplistic view of lions. I agree that lions don't really have the capacity to domesticate a flock of sheep, but to suggest that they're mindless killing machines that would meaninglessly mass slaughter sheep the first chance they got is weird. They're complicated creatures with rich emotional lives, and I've personally seen them plenty of times pass up opportunities to kill because there was no point. Interestingly, there's also lots of youtube footage of lions and other big cats attempting to care for other animals (albeit typically ineptly).

Post reply on HN