Live data from Hacker News

U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

apnews.com

601–610 of 731 posts

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

#601
> “If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university’s animal-to-human transplant program.

Which means we now think we have the right to kill as many pigs we want not only the eat them but to extract their organs to make humans live.

Is this really that different from just killing a random healthy human being to save other humans who need a transplant? We somehow think we are superior than any other animal in earth and have the right to do whatever.

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

#602
post #342

Earlier 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.

From what I heard, the pig lived a relativity good life. It was well cared for by the large animal veterinary school on campus. Had more space and better food than any factory raised pig. All experiments passed an ethics review. The pig was anesthetized before any procedure. The number of experiments may sound barbaric on the surface, but it was to reduce the overall number of pigs used in trials. Modern medicine wou…

Also, we are saving human lives. With success in this procedure, we could be saving your/our loved ones.

From the article:

“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” [the patient] said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”

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

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is very weird. Was it from the family or from an imam? I know breast milk has a few rules around it in islam, but it mostly boils down to sharing breast milk creating a form kinship between the babies sharing the milk. As in, you become in a way sister/brother with the other baby. But I agree that many Muslims have a...lot of folk beliefs and take a lot of mental shortcuts that lead to reductive interpretations…

It was family elders. They are pretty serious about religion, attend Islamic lectures etc. And they were mostly concerned about pork consumption of donors. No one mentioned anything about forming milk kinship.

> family elders

With all due respect, the worst people you can ask for religious advice would be family elder, imams in local mosques. In that order. Find someone who actually studied the religion not just someone who memorized a book.

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

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at this thread what I find strange is how we try to justify things to ourselves. How we come up with these frameworks to justify our behavior is the strange thing to me. On one hand we have the vegans who deny their very biological nature in order to fulfill the precept: "thou shall not kill." Vegans don't eat meat eat even though the human body is clearly a machine designed to eat meat. Why deny nature? On t…

> Either way we're just humans on a ball of dust encircling a tiny spark that's going to go super nova anyway. Who cares. Math is suppose to make sense. Morality is not. You can justify just about anything with that perspective.

Or justify nothing.

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

#605
post #596
post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrialized farming is worlds different from these idealistic "small family subsistence farms." The hypothetical world in which one might be able to raise animals ethically as a food source isn't the same one that can have massive businesses turning a profit from supplying animal meat to millions of people. I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost w…

> I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost would simply be unimaginable. It'd be quite easy to survive if there were enough people who cared about the well-being of animals and experienced sufficient economic stability to make consumption choices that don't necessarily maximize calories/dollar. Unfortunately those people tend to eschew animal product c…

Even "small" farms have a number of practices that the average person would find appalling if they became aware of them. There's a place for graphic descriptions of these activities intended to upset and dismay "non-vegans" but I don't think that place is a tech board. If you are curious as to what these practices are, looking up videos/practices related to modern dairy production that are popular even on small dairy farms or male chick culling might be a decent start, PETA also has plenty of resources available. (I'm sure there are some really tiny family-owned farms that don't employ these practices.)

Aside from this, farms, like all industries, follow the "tendency towards monopoly" where ever larger players will consolidate, merge, and buyout their competition to maximize their collective control of the market share. I think as long as there is a market for animal products, that market will be overwhelmingly captured by large industrialized farms. It's precisely the most upsetting practices on factory farms that keep costs low enough to make products accessible to working class Americans.

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

#606
post #370

Earlier 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.

Not sure where it came from, but there is a popular notion that scientists are somehow more moral than everyone else. Obviously that's not true. A lot of terrible things were made and many terrible acts committed by scientists. They can be just as depraved as the rest of us.

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

#607
post #600
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the bar for how well we treat other animals is now "is it having a better life than a factory farmed animal"? We have a long way to go don't we?

It's also a better life than what most animals have in the wild. The wild isn't some fairytale happy place; it's a place of hunger, fear, brutality, pain and disease. It reminds me of the old saying: "they overexaggerated the aggressiveness of European wolves, they're only dangerous when hungry". Ok, so did European wolves just go to the shop to buy food when hungry?

so by your logic as per statement #1: do you think an iron age peasant, who undoubtably would have had a more brutal life than us, would have swapped their freedom and way of life for being kept in a cage, being experimented on by technology they would find to be terrifying dark magic that could kill them at any moment (see above commenter's mention of the pigs having heart attacks), all for some basic but guaranteed food each day?

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

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Design implies intent— it implies that something was developed for a purpose, that it's _supposed_ to be used in a certain way. You could say "design" by natural selection which is MY primary intent. What is the appropriate word if not design? Your hands have a purpose even if they were not "designed." The purpose in this case is to grasp things. The purpose of the human body is then to eat meat and vegetables. The…

I don't think you're a creationist - this is just a very common distinction in thinking about evolution that results in all sorts of illogical fallacies. This is my exact point: Your hands have no purpose. They evolved in a way that aided in survival. If someone is born mutated with their fingers fused together and then suddenly the entire earth floods and they find their solid hands help them swim better - were thei…

This is pedantic. Everybody knows about evolution and natural selection and the intricacies behind the process, it's old news.

Energy flows into and out of a system in a way where the configuration of particles begins arranging itself in lower and lower entropy formulations. The net entropy of the universe remains forever increasing but within this system it begins lowering. One of these low entropy formulation begins self replication imperfectly thereby introducing memory and mutation into the system allowing complexity to build on itself thereby producing particle configurations of immense low entropy and complexity.

Is there any "intent" in the description above? No. But you must consider the factor below:

Clearly your hands weren't designed with an intelligent intent. Yet there is something different about your hand then there is a rock. What is the word used to describe this difference? "Design" flows better, that's it, no need to get into "illogical fallacies."

>We're finding microorganisms that can consume plastic. Does that mean they evolved for the purpose of eating plastic, a substance not typically found in nature? >In my worldview, no, they weren't. They can consume plastic, but that has no bearing on their purpose,

I don't know if you can see this, but your argument here is not profound. You are making a linguistic argument. You are arguing for the definition of the word "Purpose" or "Design." We BOTH know EXACTLY what is going on with natural selection and "design" is simply an easier way to express a point that your hand is a lower entropy configuration of atoms that is clearly very efficient at grasping things. But my previous sentence is an inefficient way of saying it. I could just say your hand is designed for the purpose of grasping things and the rock is not.

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

#609
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One word: 3D printing. Ok that was two words, but still exciting.

This has absolutely nothing to do with 3D printing.

They're talking about bioprinting which is a rapidly developing field, with a lot of recent successes in "printing" liver tissue:

https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/tr-biofab-pulls-off-brea...

Being able to have a 3D printed liver is very plausible within the next decade.

https://www.3dsourced.com/guides/3d-printed-liver/

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

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're a creationist - this is just a very common distinction in thinking about evolution that results in all sorts of illogical fallacies. This is my exact point: Your hands have no purpose. They evolved in a way that aided in survival. If someone is born mutated with their fingers fused together and then suddenly the entire earth floods and they find their solid hands help them swim better - were thei…

Your scenario with mutated hands ignores that evolution is about selection, not just single mutations. If hands evolved over a period of millions of years to be able to push water better, you could indeed say they evolved for the purpose of swimming. This is similar to saying that an eye’s purpose is to see, or a heart’s purpose is to pump blood, which are hardly controversial statements. A purpose doesn’t have to im…

Thats an interesting point but I think I'd have to disagree - purpose is very much constrained to concious design. Those traits were selected not for the purpose of swimming but merely due to the pressure of selection itself. In your example of flippers, the selection pressure is likely on mobility but the purpose of a limb is not mobility in and of itself. Would that make a flipper purposeless if moving over land?
Post reply on HN