What happens to other parts from these genetically modified pigs? Can some be used for other transplants? Can rest be eaten?
Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
21–30 of 122 posts
Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#22I remember this; didn't last long :-(
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/09/1085420836/pig-heart-transpla...
Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#23[flagged]
14% of the US population is black, whereas 0.001% of the US is a zookeeper. So, I'd imagine that the bar for mentioning a particular group most affected by a disorder is somewhere between 14% and "so low as to be a rounding error."
If there are relevant factors that are associated with a particular disorder, mentioning that fact seems pretty relevant. This is particularly true for something as complex as a transplant, where the difference between rejection and non-rejection is small.
Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#24[flagged]
I mean it's a fact that Black people have a higher chance of suffering from a kidney disease. (I wonder why too)
Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#25It doesn’t mention the most important thing. Does he have to take immunosuppressants? If so is it for the rest of his life.
I don’t feel like that’s the most important thing. If we can farm kidneys for folks with kidney failure, rather than rely on a combination of the kindness of live donors and harvesting organs from corpses, it will be a huge step forward, even if recipients still need immunosuppressants (as they do with human organs). I do wonder if the immunosuppressants for cross-species organs have to be stronger/nastier than for i…
I didn’t realize you had to take lifelong immunosuppressants with human organs as well. That makes this indistinguishable, provided it keeps working.
Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#26Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is confusing, because one possible reading of this is that the procedure works only on Black people. Thats not a reasonable interpretation. They're just saying that the recipient is a member of a group with higher rates of kidney disease, and therefore the transpant techniques may particularly (but not solely) benefit that group. The rest of your comment is unnecessary supposition.
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What it is very clearly saying is this:
> The patient is a Black man, and the procedure may have special significance for Black patients [because they] suffer high rates of end-stage kidney disease.
I grant you that the grammar of the sentence does leave a smidgen of ambiguity. But I don't see any other plausible reading if you bring even a little bit of context to the interpretive exercise--which is just as much a part of reading as understanding the syntax. The author is justified in expecting that good faith readers will understand the final clause as explaining the clause that goes immediately before it.
It's also a huge and unreasonable leap to go from "this sentence has a slight ambiguity" to "the sentence can be reasonably interpreted to mean that the procedure only works on black people." It can't.
Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#28[flagged]
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Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#29[flagged]
If zookeepers suspiciously had higher rates of kidney failure then yes I think it would be mentioned.
Re: Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
#30What happens to other parts from these genetically modified pigs? Can some be used for other transplants? Can rest be eaten?
I don’t think you’d want to eat severely genetically modified pigs though. Who know what kinds of viruses can make the jump to humans in a chimera like that. Ideally those pigs would be kept in some kind of sterile biohazard location and their bodies would ideally be incinerated afterwards.