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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

#311

Post by ovi256 »

threshold wrote: post #305

Is this compassionate use or experimentation on a dying patient for the future benefit of the rest of us? I’m fine with the latter, if consensual. But only if we call it what it is.

First generation transplants are always both. David would have died soon without this (he's quite likely to die soon with it too, unfortunately, if this goes anything like other first of a kind transplant receivers). Desperate people accept desperate measures, and the hope that it may teach us how to save others helps too.

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

#312

Post by madaxe_again »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #279
Buttons840 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then the next step is to do research showing that pigs that are happy, stress free, and eat a good diet produce organs that are better for transplant. If so, this might be one of the most ethical animal industries.

Maybe we could grow happy, stress free and well fed human beings. Then we wouldn't need so many transplants in the first place.

Ah, but the human is more economically productive than the pig, particularly when taken as a cohort, and healthcare and happiness are expensive - and there is therefore a point of diminishing returns for increased happiness and health.

It makes more sense to allow a certain portion of your population to die of preventable causes than to make them all happy, as the current net goal is economic productivity, not human happiness. This is demonstrated aptly by the lack of socialised healthcare in much of the world, and where it does exist, the relative paucity of resources provided.

So, while I agree in spirit with what you posit, capitalism and the value axis it brings has to die first.

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

#313

Post by neuronic »

pjc50 wrote: post #308
jostmey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

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

#314

Post by teekert »

threshold wrote: post #305

Is this compassionate use or experimentation on a dying patient for the future benefit of the rest of us? I’m fine with the latter, if consensual. But only if we call it what it is.

That is what a clinical trial is. There is now other way. Although with organs-on-a-chip we are working on at least getting the animal testing stages confined to a minimum. Over time we may reduce the risk to first recipients of new tech using these new technologies. Perhaps even digital models may at somepoint start playing a role. But until we have digital models, this is what we have. And it does seem to work well in this case.

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

#315

Post by throwanem »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #261
BreakfastB0b wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human Bacon, the final frontier. How long until you can buy Beyond Human burgers?

Bitelabs, a startup purportedly launched to deliver celebrity salami, made that joke in 2014.

Hufu had a product in 2005: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu

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

#316

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #308
jostmey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

[deleted]

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

#317

Post by spoonjim »

pkaye wrote: post #52
drenvuk wrote: post #21

I'm a full on speciesist. let's do more of this. since we're already eating them I feel like this even a more reasonable usage of their lives. can we do kidneys next please? we can basically shut down most dialysis clinics after that.

They did so a pig to human kidney transplant recently however it was on a brain dead man as an initial test. Probably soon it be on a living patient. As a person on a kidney transplant waitlist, it given me some hope for the future. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-pig-to-human-transpla...

No post body was provided.

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

#318

Post by spoonjim »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #222
drenvuk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not zero cost morality wise to kill anything at any point in their lifetime; from bacteria, to worms, to flies, to pigs each has its own weight on a person's conscience be it nil or hefty. I mean that. But a pig is not human so it's acceptable to me.

Would you feel the same if cats were the only animal whose organs could be harvested?

Yes, I would be OK with killing any number of cats to save any human’s life.

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

#319

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

neuronic wrote: post #313
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.

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.

I don’t sense hostility outside the typical vocal minority. Having straddled the FDA-regulated world and the libertarian-leaning internet cultures through the aughts and teens, my experience is that the internet libertarians are simply ignorant of how the FDA actually serves us. Pretty typically libertarian—freedom as long as nothing gets more dangerous. Kind of like rebellious children.

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

#320

Post by jillesvangurp »

radu_floricica wrote: post #254

I've said this before here and got downvoted for it, but bioethicists as a profession are responsible for more death than pretty much anything else I can quickly think of. People are dying from heart disease all the time, very often in predictable conditions. Literally millions every year. Statistically this means we should hear about such failed procedures many many more times than we do now - there is literally no…

Ethical protocols are useful to have to prevent genuinely bad stuff from happening but they are indeed over used to instead limit legal and political liability; which is not the type of "bad stuff" most people would care about but which is something that gets expensive quickly if you are a multi billion dollar corporation in the business of converting government funding into profit (aka. a Pharmaceutical company). The only bad outcome they really care about is of a financial nature.

When ethics devolves into morals and religion, it gets worse because in that case the "bad stuff" is somebody feeling offended/insulted and when that conflicts with potentially life saving new treatments; that in itself might be considered a bad thing (unethical?). Ethics has this way of contradicting itself.

When you weigh two bad outcomes, the rational thing to do (the least bad thing) might not be the ethical thing to do but some people (me) would still consider that the right thing to do. When letting people die that want to live (an important caveat) is more ethical than doing something to prevent that, something is very wrong. Also letting them die when they actually want to is considered unethical by some.

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