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Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

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Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#261

Post by pavement_sort »

Retric wrote: post #256
TeMPOraL wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It can be true that stacks of paper are better than a single screen in some ways and worse in others. Other people like to be able to spread out multiple sheets of paper in front of them, even if you do not. You are correct that digital search is a huge plus of having a digital interface.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#262

Post by mapt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #198
latexr wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer…

> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surpr…

> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow.

The price of a lowend Android tablet can be shockingly low, to the point that physical multitasking is totally practical for an environment as expensive as space travel. The issue is bloat. The UI for a Trek level starship could easily run on 1999 era PC hardware much less powerful than a 2025 postage stamp of an SOC, if we were still coding like it was 1999. But not if it has to run Android Infinity with subpixel AI super resolution, a voice interface, and no less than 70MB of various JavaScript frameworks crammed into a locked Chromium frontend.

I run a Motorola mobile device at work (retail) that would be competitive with 10-15 year old flagship phones. The browser interface is designed for tracking and ease of development and to show off new AI tools. It employs landing pages, phased loading, a bunch of dynamic things. Looking up a SKU number takes 2-5 minutes (MINUTES) to load things I could get in ten milliseconds on a console interface or hundreds of milliseconds in a 1999 World Wide Web e-commerce site.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#263

Post by gniv »

SoftTalker wrote: post #5
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

“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…

Meanwhile we can’t figure out how to provide a basic level of housing and healthcare to everyone.

We're slowly starting to realize that societal problems are as hard as (or even harder than) technological problems.

At least we seem to have figured out how to, um, steer large populations quickly, now we need to use that to effect positive change.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#264

Post by daedrdev »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #125

How about the donor piggy though? If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)

The ethical reasoning is we don't care about the pigs, millions of lives will be saved by exno kidney transplants. The argument is already very strong that we should pay to donate their kidneys given the scale of death (especially among the poor) kidney disease already causes, so a pig is nothing in comparison

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#265

Post by rotexo »

latexr wrote: post #178
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

“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…

> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer…

The stacks of tablets were because of DRM (a cybersecurity method to manage the threats of data exfiltration, “Digital Romulan Management”)

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#266

Post by Retric »

pavement_sort wrote: post #261
Retric wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It can be true that stacks of paper are better than a single screen in some ways and worse in others. Other people like to be able to spread out multiple sheets of paper in front of them, even if you do not. You are correct that digital search is a huge plus of having a digital interface.

If we’re talking 3-5 pieces of one sided paper for say homework you can spread them out nicely, but scale that to multiple stacks of loose paper and it invariably becomes a mess.

Thus, in practice almost everyone is using multiple screens at work when they can even if printing stuff is trivial.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#267

Post by oksurewhynot »

Does this mean you can catch pig kidney diseases (they specifically mention turning of a few retroviruses)? I'm assuming pig kidneys are immune to certain human diseases and vice versa. Kind of wild that you have a single organ running an entirely different mammalian OS distro but it is similar enough that it Just Works.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#268

Post by hinkley »

goku12 wrote: post #151
j_timberlake wrote: post #94

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…

> and really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning is a thing. There was another technology under development, colloquially called the 'ghost heart' [1]. It uses a dead heart that's similar to a human's, most likely a pig's heart (I speculate that an unused human heart can also be used). They remove all the cells from the heart using a soap-like substance to obtain a ghostly white colored scaffolding of a…

Any time I haven’t heard about a tech for ten years I assume it didn’t work. I think I first heard of this stuff around ten years ago. At the time I think they were focused on kidneys. But those have a lot of complex plumbing.

As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context, or not so close to the problem they can’t see it, I would assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for bypasses and aneurism repair operations. Ghost intestines for reconstruction surgery for people with cancer or massive internal trauma. You’d have a simpler organ to reproduce, but in the artery case you’d likely have to also work turnaround time. Heart failure can be slow, but bypass surgery is often scheduled as either urgent or emergency (I just had a convo with a man who wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital after an angiogram showed he was one stairwell away from a fatal heart attack). But not having to harvest material from the thigh before surgery begins should shorten the surgery and reduce complications. You can have as much artery as you want for the surgery. You could have spares.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#269

Post by nanolith »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #125

How about the donor piggy though? If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)

I'm living with heart failure. I have 20-30 years before I'll need a transplant, if I live a perfect lifestyle and keep my other health issues under control. Due to my other health issues, I am not a good candidate for a human heart transplant. It's not that a human heart transplant would fail, but that when I'd be placed against others on the list for a new heart, my other health issues would reduce my priority such that there is always someone with higher priority to receive a heart, up until the point in which I'm no longer healthy enough to receive a transplant. There are far too few human hearts, and far too many people who need one. All that the transplant boards can do is give hearts to those with the greatest momentary need, with the best chance of surviving.

Xenotransplantation is one of the life lines I'm counting on. I'm hoping that, by the time I need it, the issues that we currently have will be worked out. I have zero ethical issues with breeding and eventually culling pigs in order to save human lives. I hope that there will be other, better, breakthroughs by then, but if not, the best I can hope for is that the pigs are raised in a sterile and enriching environment, and that the only bad day they have is their last day.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#270

Post by tsoukase »

parpfish wrote: post #33

I was just thinking about heart transplants and how they’re treated as commonplace now, but they are nuts when you think about them. You can hook up the nerve wires and blood pipes from one body into the heart from another body and it works? Just thinking about the simple physical connections would make me nervous. Why isn’t there blood just leaking out in your body? Why isn’t that other heart sliding out of place wh…

In all viscera sympathetic and para- keep balance of muscle function. But in steady state the para- must fire more powerfully because the sympathetic intrinsically dominates a little. So if you cut off both systems, the organ has a sympathetic boost. In heart's case this will make it beat faster, I believe about 20-30 more beats per minute (after some self-compensation). This is easily treated with a beta blocker.
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