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Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

irishtimes.com

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Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#431

Post by ashtonkem »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #387
inglor_cz wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recipient is a non-Muslim, so no Sharia-related problems in his case. AFAIK it is not forbidden for a Muslim to touch pigs, only to eat them. Pigs and dogs are impure, but you can perform ablution afterwards. Muslims normally own hunting and guarding dogs. That would actually be a common problem for Coalition soldiers in Iraq when they tried to enter a village by stealth - lots of barking. "This impureness nevert…

I understand why pigs are “impure” (parasites in the meat), but why dogs?

“Dogs are pets” is one of those cultural background assumptions that can be pretty jarring when you realize it’s not a universally held belief. There are pretty large chunks of the planet where dogs are mostly unwanted pests at best.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#432

Post by roywiggins »

nicoburns wrote: post #357
gpm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're genetically modifying the pigs to be more like humans, I wonder if there would be health risks with eating the meat - specifically from prions. Similar to those that come from eating humans. Admittedly probably negligible until we modify them a heck of a lot more than we are right now (if they do theoretically exist).

Apparently they have recently granted permission for these (type of) pigs to be sold for meat so those who suffer with alpha-gal syndrome (and are thus allergic to regular meat) can eat it. So I’m guessing by not.

I think the ones approved for consumption don't have the full set of genetic modifications used for this transplant, they just have the alpha-gal change.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#433

Post by throwaway0a5e »

jostmey wrote: post #8
phnofive wrote: post #2

Discussed here fifteen days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882912 Not a huge update but an interesting discussion of FDA approval; can the FDA actually stop or sanction experimental procedures like this?

Yes, the FDA will insert itself to regulate medicine wherever it can. For example, the FDA has been pushing to regulate diagnostic tests as medical devices. It’s funny how Americans surrender medical autonomy to the government but draw a strict line in the sand in other issues

>It’s funny how Americans surrender medical autonomy to the government but draw a strict line in the sand in other issues

If they knew the extent of it they probably wouldn't.

I don't know where you're from but I'm sure the people there show equal apathy on some subjects.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#434

Post by sandworm101 »

jostmey wrote: post #8
phnofive wrote: post #2

Discussed here fifteen days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882912 Not a huge update but an interesting discussion of FDA approval; can the FDA actually stop or sanction experimental procedures like this?

Yes, the FDA will insert itself to regulate medicine wherever it can. For example, the FDA has been pushing to regulate diagnostic tests as medical devices. It’s funny how Americans surrender medical autonomy to the government but draw a strict line in the sand in other issues

>> to regulate diagnostic tests as medical devices.

Like MIR machines? Like blood labs? Like home pregnancy tests? Without the FDA's regulation of medicine we would quickly be back to snake oil and cocaine in everything. It is bad enough that drugs stores are allowed to sell water as a "homeopathic remedy". The snake oil people are out there waiting for deregulation.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#435

Post by albrewer »

thegabriele wrote: post #321

From the article: "[pigs] they can be genetically manipulated to produce organs less likely to be rejected on transplantation." Is this true? How would these manipulations be carried out?

There's a sugar that most animals produce but humans don't[0]. These pigs have been genetically modified to not produce that sugar, the thought being that that's what's responsible for the xenotransplantation rejections[1].

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html [1] https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20201214/fda-oks-ge...

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#436

Post by Chris2048 »

exabyte wrote: post #39
userbinator wrote: post #32

I wonder how long it'll last, given the pig it came out of was probably already an adult, and pigs live far shorter lives than humans.

Don't get talk about people "feeling" the person from whom they received the transplant inside them? If so, how would a pig seem?

People talk about a lot of things. God, ghosts, karma. No evidence it isn't anything other than psychological.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#437

Post by InitialLastName »

4bpp wrote: post #372
neuronic wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hostility towards FDA on HN is incredible. I wouldn't trust some VC funded startup bros with anything related to medicine at all without having passed every single regulatory board tangentially related to whatever they are doing, even more so after Theranos.

It's not like "enforce more" vs. "enforce less" is the only axis along which the behaviour of a government agency can be tweaked. For an extreme example, imagine you had a court system that picks 100 people at random to execute each year (most of whom are naturally innocent). Then, you have a crime wave. Would you say that the solution to this problem would be that the courts need to be tougher ? ... more lenient ? B…

> it simply needs to get better at its job

The issue here (and with regulators in general) is that in general "being better at their job" means going into more depth to determine whether an approval is warranted, which means expending more resources on investigation. I don't know that I've ever seen any overlap between the people who think the regulators do a bad job at regulating and people who think we should be funding the regulators more thoroughly.

All that not to mention that when a regulator like the FDA starts going into more depth in its investigations of an industry, that industry's firms start spending more money on either complying with or deceiving the regulator, risking a downward spiral of wasted resources.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#438

Post by throwaway0a5e »

bobsmooth wrote: post #329
pjc50 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regulate diagnostic tests If only there hadn't been a major high profile collapse of a fraudulent diagnostic test company recently.

Regulations are written in blood, then the blood darkens and people forget why we have regulations.

Too often it seems it's blood of the lobbyist who slipped and fell on ice while carrying a suitcase full of benjamins.

Your quip is an easy one to make but there is very clearly no shortage of entities who peddle goods and services seeking, often successfully, to influence lawmaker so those goods and services are legally required despite the benefit to society being marginal if even measurable.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#439

Post by cameronh90 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #377
cameronh90 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm vegetarian and have no issue with using animals for medical purposes like this. It's one thing to kill for pleasure as in fur, cosmetics and food, but quite another to kill an animal to save a human life. I am pretty sure even most vegans would be happy to accept an animal death to save their own life, even a pet. Similarly, I guess, I was vegan but I had to stop that diet as it caused severe health problems for…

Once you kill the pig for its heart and kidneys, you might as well eat it. Better than letting the nutritional value of the meat go to waste. That wouldn't be a lot of pigs, true, and a pork chop of that origin would be pretty expensive.

Perhaps I'm somewhat of an atypical veg, but I am okay with that - although I personally wouldn't as I no longer like meat.

I also would not ban meat consumption if I was a dictator, but I would enforce extremely high ethical standards, carbon neutrality and proper management of agricultural effluent. I suspect that would make a pork chop pretty expensive too.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#440

Post by InitialLastName »

dnautics wrote: post #389
neuronic wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hostility towards FDA on HN is incredible. I wouldn't trust some VC funded startup bros with anything related to medicine at all without having passed every single regulatory board tangentially related to whatever they are doing, even more so after Theranos.

There are a wide range of options between startup bros and government. For example, in the US, a lot of electrical component standards and testing are managed by the UL, which is a nonprofit ngo. Maybe something like "a UL for drug approval" might be worth a go.

The market for counterfeit and unregulated chargers and electronics on Amazon/Alibaba (most all of which are UL marked) and fires related to the above suggests that the UL doesn't really have any teeth.

It's possible that medical approvals would be less prone to this sidestepping of independent regulators, since much of the spending is proxied by insurance companies looking to maximize profits and minimize BS spending, but I have very little confidence that such a system would function.

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