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U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

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Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#591

Post by tptacek »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #381
tptacek wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends! One of my kids is a biochemist wrapping up his degree this semester in a vet-med lab (send job opportunities!). He's done one study with pigs, where they were developing new enteric vaccines. At the conclusion of the study there's nothing wrong with the pigs --- they're just hyper-vaccinated --- but without a place to send them, all they can do is euthanize. He spent a week or two trying to re-home the pi…

Dave Arnold tried to take euthanized research pigs to cook, back when he worked in, iirc, Dr. Oz's lab. No dice.

Right; it depends on the circumstances. There are things you can do to a pig that make them unavailable for other uses, but I can say with some authority that there is medical research you can do on a pig that leaves it available. Also, the pigs the boy was working with hadn't been euthanized yet (avoiding euthanizing them was the point of finding someone to take them).

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#592

Post by kahrl »

bckr wrote: post #358
lostlogin wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that." A dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Is this a quote from something? Because I'm certain pigs have personality. I'm even somewhat confident they have as much personality as dogs.

Well, we'd have to be talkin' 'bout one charmin' motherfuckin' pig.

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#593

Post by johnisgood »

postalrat wrote: post #404
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was only recently acquainted with the idea that there are many people on the internet who become very angry that some people eat dog meat, but do not with say cow meat or pig meat. — I find this rather strange and do not understand this.

We owe dogs a great debt for helping humanity for many thousands of years.

What does this even mean... care to elaborate?

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#594

Post by snek_case »

tantalor wrote: post #207
snek_case wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they reach maturity in 6 months only then might it make sense to create humanized pigs (with crucial genes replaced by human DNA) that are cultivated specifically for their organs? Fairly cruel I know, but these pigs would be treated better than pigs cultivated for meat, that's for sure.

Go read "Oryx and Crake"

TL;DR ?

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#595

Post by johnisgood »

enjoyyourlife wrote: post #403
FundementalBrit wrote: post #115

Will make Jews and Muslims question their faith if this becomes a mainstream thing. Personally I think this is a amazing scientific achievement and will be following the story closely.

The prohibition is against eating pig, not benefiting from it

You do benefit from eating pig though. :)

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#596

Post by jakear »

badRNG wrote: post #574
jakear wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off topic but you seem level-headed and I've been wondering about this for a while: what's your vegan "endgame"? The way I see it, the "vegan utopia" would get rid of all small family farms (even strictly milk/egg ones) -- where animals are given all the food they need, have access to good medical care, are sheltered from predators, and are able to reproduce and nurse offspring -- and replace all that with... a…

Industrialized farming is worlds different from these idealistic "small family subsistence farms." The hypothetical world in which one might be able to raise animals ethically as a food source isn't the same one that can have massive businesses turning a profit from supplying animal meat to millions of people. I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost w…

> I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost would simply be unimaginable.

It'd be quite easy to survive if there were enough people who cared about the well-being of animals and experienced sufficient economic stability to make consumption choices that don't necessarily maximize calories/dollar. Unfortunately those people tend to eschew animal product consumption all together, resulting in your (correct) analysis that the number of animals living in misery on factory farms is dramatically overtaking the number living at harmony on family farms.

I don't buy from factory farms, but any time I go to a local store or farmers market and see a good local cheese, I buy it. I've visited many of the farms personally and have never seen a situation where it didn't look like the animals were living their best life. To shut those farms down, kill off their bloodlines, and replace them with... a way smaller number of slightly different looking ruminants spending their whole existence feeling (rightfully) frightened for their life upon any external stimulus? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that's the "ideal" case, in reality it's far more likely that the farm will be bought up by some big commercial entity willing to cut more corners than that the good fertile accessible land will simply be yielded to the wild. [1]

[1] "as average farm size has increased, the number of individual farms in the United States has decreased." https://www.statista.com/statistics/196106/average-size-of-f...

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#597

Post by greedo »

JetAlone wrote: post #251
derekp7 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel the same way about other life saving technologies such as seat belts and motorcycle helmets? What about hitting the anti lock breaks when a semi pulls out in front of you? The same philosophy can be applied to other life saving / extending measures such as adjustments to diet, or taking high blood pressure medicine.

No. None of those safety implements you describe are things that alter the structure of my body, they are applied to augment the safety of existing pieces of external technology. So if they symbolize something negative, it would have to be along the lines of "constraining worldly authority" which could be argued to be a natural precaution, or an overprotective tyrannical overreach, but the nature of it is not the sam…

I have had Lasik eye surgery to alter defects in my vision. So that might be an abomination? I also had a colostomy after fighting cancer, so my stoma might be an abomination? That about the knee surgery that repaired a torn meniscus?

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#598

Post by kaba0 »

johnisgood wrote: post #589
kaba0 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we can eat meat but we are by no means obligate carnivores like cats are. A cat will die on a no-meat diet, while we can easily live on plants alone.

No. Lack of meat leads to vitamin B12 deficiency which gives you all sorts of neurological issues. Pretty damn horrible ones. > The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics warns of the risk of vitamin B12 deficiencies in vegetarians and vegans. Vitamin B12 is found naturally only in animal products. A lack of vitamin B12 can lead to anemia and blindness. It can also cause muscle weakness, tingling, and numbness. We might…

Algae has plenty of B12. Also, this is a vitamin deficiency, compared to obligate carnivores like cat that can’t digest plants. It is a significant difference between the two.

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#599

Post by RankingMember »

deltaonefour wrote: post #365
Sporktacular wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature. Weirder how it can be said without a sympathetic or concerned response. I hope we can someday move beyond seeing animals as a mere resource.

Looking at this thread what I find strange is how we try to justify things to ourselves. How we come up with these frameworks to justify our behavior is the strange thing to me. On one hand we have the vegans who deny their very biological nature in order to fulfill the precept: "thou shall not kill." Vegans don't eat meat eat even though the human body is clearly a machine designed to eat meat. Why deny nature? On t…

> Either way we're just humans on a ball of dust encircling a tiny spark that's going to go super nova anyway. Who cares. Math is suppose to make sense. Morality is not.

You can justify just about anything with that perspective.

Re: U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

#600

Post by c048 »

uhtred wrote: post #579
dexwiz wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I heard, the pig lived a relativity good life. It was well cared for by the large animal veterinary school on campus. Had more space and better food than any factory raised pig. All experiments passed an ethics review. The pig was anesthetized before any procedure. The number of experiments may sound barbaric on the surface, but it was to reduce the overall number of pigs used in trials. Modern medicine wou…

So the bar for how well we treat other animals is now "is it having a better life than a factory farmed animal"? We have a long way to go don't we?

It's also a better life than what most animals have in the wild. The wild isn't some fairytale happy place; it's a place of hunger, fear, brutality, pain and disease.

It reminds me of the old saying: "they overexaggerated the aggressiveness of European wolves, they're only dangerous when hungry". Ok, so did European wolves just go to the shop to buy food when hungry?

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