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Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

nature.com

251–260 of 293 posts

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#251
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting way to interpret it! I see what you mean, but I still can't see myself interpreting that headline in that way. Does it really give that vibe?

Seeing as the subject of the sentence is the pig organ, it's saying the organ is the one doing the surviving and only tangentionally mentions the person surviving by calling then living. I (and presumably we) only come to a different interperetation because I have the context that the latter is the important bit. If I give some other similarly structured sentences but without context, how would you interperet these?…

Well, the pig organ could fail immediately, causing the person to go back on dialysis for 6 months. That person would've also lived for 6 months after a transplant.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would we? What for? Why would we need reams of iPads on our desks? To use like we'd use paper. > Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do. > and don’t know what the right answer is. They're not supposed to. This…

> To use like we'd use paper. How we use paper derives not only from our own practical needs, but also from the intrinsic limitations of paper. Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size. The idiosyncratic way that tablets were used in Star Trek isn't how people would actually do things, it merely reflects the…

> Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size.

Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with one paper sheet-sized screen is a significant downgrade. Which is why tablets are used primarily for entertainment, not for work.

Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around you is an advantage, not a limitation, of the paper-based workflow.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To use like we'd use paper. How we use paper derives not only from our own practical needs, but also from the intrinsic limitations of paper. Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size. The idiosyncratic way that tablets were used in Star Trek isn't how people would actually do things, it merely reflects the…

> Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size. Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with one paper sheet-sized screen is a significant downgrade . Which is why tablets are used primarily for entertainment, not for work. Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around you is an advantage , not…

No, a single screen is a massive upgrade over using stacks of paper.

People vastly prefer digital dictionaries over paper dictionaries because you can more quickly find stuff. And that’s with dictionaries in alphabetical order.

Stacks of paper suck, there’s some potential utility in a space ship for all the redundancy around independent tablets you can hand someone. That’s something that regularly happens on the show and kind of makes sense, but is more a visual reference for the audience. Which is where stacks of tablets shine, the viewer can easily follow what their doing even if you can’t see the screen.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#257
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: the nerves between the brain and heart are never reattached. A heart already has all of the facilities to keep working all by itself. Even weirder is that an adult kidney transplanted into a child will actually shrink to fit.

Another fun fact: you can remove all of the brain of a cat on threadmill except the brainstem and he'll keep walking.

…Do you have a link? I’m not sure if I want to see proof of that, but I’m at the same time curious how you’d manage to do it without disturbing the cat.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#258

Transplanted kidneys get rejected by the recipient's immune system eventually, you'd really need to clone the kidney from the individual's DNA to solve the rejection problem. There's also been some success with integrating the DNA from the kidney donor (a human) into the recipient's bone marrow to stop the rejection process, but I hear it can be a brutal procedure in which the original bone marrow must be destroyed u…

It's not entirely impossible that a broadly compatible tissue could be engineered - in a more through version of the same process that yielded those "somewhat human-compatible" pig organs.

That's a part of the reason why this tech is so promising. If we can already target immune incompatibilities to make "elongated pigs" with organs that fit human bodies somewhat, then what are the limits?

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#259

“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…

> “Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal

Replacing human heart valves with pig valves has been a thing at least as far back as the 1970s with decade-ish survival rates.

Granted TFA is about a whole organ -- not just a piece of tissue -- but xenotransplantation per se is not new.

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