I was thinking, big deal, didn't they do a pig heart transplant back in 1999?
Turns out that was a popular children's novel and TV series in the UK called "Pig Heart Boy", not reality. First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.
This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel.
I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.
Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.
It wasn't the entire heart but people have had things like valves transplanted from animals. Kevin Rudd had a bovine aortic valve transplanted back in 2011.
> First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.
That patient died shortly thereafter. The condition is critical and there's a lot of immunological pressure put on the patient.
China is smart to study this in living cadavers first. It's much easier to find patients that aren't already on death's door, and there is no need to keep the patient alive. You can run experiment after experiment.
Presumably people who are on the verge of death and beyond any kind of proven treatments. They're technically alive but have a very short predicted lifespan.
You can try a novel treatment on those but at the same time are limited by ethical concerns regarding pain and future survival (if the transplant "works", you are now in a tricky situation, as you can't easily do anything that has the potential to make the situation worse... and given it's uncharted territory, anything has the potential to make it worse).
Brain-dead people don't have such limitations. You don't have to worry about causing pain nor shortening potential survival, so you can try things that are likely to "kill" them (cause the transplant to fail, or other issues) and learn from the outcomes.
Agree with you on that. People can say that there is a procedure, but verifying that they are following it is another matter. Also curious as to the process for volunteering people for such experiments. Like if there is some paperwork that the family signs off on.
Very good point - I don't have an answer for that. But I'd say if there was a choice between killing a person who is very much alive and conscious by our current standards, and one who is "brain dead" by the same standards, I'd still pick the latter.
Part of it is a choice you make when choosing to donate your body for research. There's a chance brain death can be determined incorrectly (though in this situation it's likely the same determination will be used to withdraw life-support, research donation or not).
If I'm ever declared brain dead, I want scientists experimenting on me. That's a much better use than giving organs to just a handful of people. It pushes the salients forward for everyone.
They were kind of developed, and then abandoned due to governments saving on research (not because they didn't work). Or at least one kind was: "organoids" (which is a play on that they could be grown in any form, so some student decided to print a kind of alien-shaped almost-kidney, which then led to an article ... plus when used people want a flat relatively thin shape)
They are extensively used in pharmacological research because they match real organs very well on the cellular level. But there is further research necessary to implement the large scale parts. E.g. in kidneys the actual kidney and the connection to the gall bladder forms separately and is then combined into an organ. That doesn't work, yet.
And in some cases nobody has the courage to actually use it. The list of reasons why a liver organoid couldn't be implanted into a live patient is growing very thin. Well, aside from funding (which is massive if it fails, at least the equivalent of a year's pay. 3 or 4 times a year's pay for a doctoral student).
I would like to point out that this research isn't especially badly treated. It has fared better than most programs. But it probably can't even be saved. The actual defunding happened 5 years ago and last year even the PI has moved on, and every doctoral student involved also has. I'm sure they'll answer questions on the subject if you ask, but you'll have to rebuild things from papers and email questions. There is a spinoff selling organoids to pharma, but tiny ones (think clusters of x0000 cells). If the research in scaling organoids to full sizes is restarted now, you can't really expect results the first year, maybe two at least.
Color printers need color inks for tracking dots. Get a laser, they're clog free as a bonus.
If your printer is already severely clogged and that is a major contributor to chronic ink level issues for your printer, apply few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto each of ink drawing ports(do NOT use acetone and/or ethanol; liquid form PFAS is better in narrow technical sense, IIRC). It will dissolve everything unwanted and its positive effects seem to last years, while being effectively harmless to electro-mechanical systems.
TL;DR: NO, you won't be getting a pig lung anytime soon.
>However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant.
Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment.
The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients.
Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course.
That alone is insane, incredible. Hardly measures up to the ideal of leaving the hospital, good as new, but putting that aside: 18 days on a transplant, trans-species organ? I'm in awe!
There’s a lot of work going on to try and modify the DNA of the pigs to make them “transplant-compatible” using CRISPR, avoiding rejection and lifelong medication for the patient etc;
I’d love a hard sci-fi story where they implant chunks of pig brain into brain damaged humans, trying to maintain as much “life context” but bringing in new brain matter to help them function again.
Star Trek went into this a bit. There was an episode in which the technology behind the android Data's artificial brain had been turned into a medical treatment used to prolong the life of a recurring character who got injured, and the ethical question of the subplot was roughly "how much of their brain can you subsitute with functional but essentially generic hardware before they cease to be themselves, making the rescue attempt fruitless".
Most people will probably not remember this - it was the death of Kira's lover Bareil on DS9 - because it was almost throwaway, but it was one of those sparkling little ideas and questions Star Trek used to be filled with that has stayed with me life-long.
Not exactly what you asked for, but Alastair Reynolds have books with "hyperpigs" that are part-pig, part-human, likely bred to be replacement parts for humans.
I've been reading his novels, and I like the story of the pigs.
Genetically tweaked to be more compatible with the humans that might harvest their organs, but then they became a bit too human. Then scientists were like fuck it how far can we go with this. Hyperpigs.
Scorpio is not as interesting a character as I would like, but he's a good pig.
Good question. No, because there is a fiqh (jurisprudence) rule that roughly states “necessities permit the prohibited”, which can be used to override the impurity of pigs.
In addition, some scholars (a minority) argue that perhaps one reason behind pork consumption being forbidden is due to its utility in human transplantation (thereby making it “sacred”).
In the 1920s, Voronoff advocated the transplantation of slices of chimpanzee testis into aged men whose “zest for life” was deteriorating, believing that the hormones produced by the testis would rejuvenate his patients.
Oh, this argument was definitely put forth after the fact. But the idea is that the utility of pigs must have been known to God, so perhaps this is a reason behind forbidding its consumption.
> He has only forbidden you ˹to eat˺ carrion, blood, swine[1], and what is slaughtered in the name of any other than Allah. But if someone is compelled by necessity—neither driven by desire nor exceeding immediate need—they will not be sinful. Surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
[1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8.
On the Jewish side of things there's a principle called "Pikuach Nefesh" which essentially means that outside of extremes like murder, rape, and other violent crimes against others, you should do anything possible to preserve life. If you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath and help.
A friend of mine lives in Montreal where there is a large orthodox Jewish population and he told me he was out walking one day and a woman started calling to him from the door of her house and gesturing for him to come over. She explained to him that she needed his help: there was an urgent situation and she needed to make a phone call, but because it was the Sabbath, she was not able to. He made the call for her and went on his way.
I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
Generalizing a lot here, but Jews and Christians interpret ambiguities within scripture very differently. Most Christians will try to maintain the spirit of the rule. Jews often view ambiguities as loopholes intentionally left by God. If the loophole wasn't mean to be there, God would have written it differently.
For a great example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv . Look carefully and you'll see these in Jewish areas of NYC like Williamsburg.
> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
There's a lot of crossover between Judaism and DnD player mentality. You're very much encouraged to learn the source material, the commentary and to discuss and debate it. Workarounds don't actually break the rules; and you need to put a lot of study into doing them properly.
Sometimes you need to take a sensible decision and choose to just flat out break the rules. In those situations one is encouraged to do so in an uncommon or abnormal way so it doesn't become habitual. This makes sense to me - I didn't smoke inside for the first 3 years of moving into my house, but the first time I did break that rule it made breaking it much easier the second, third, or subsequent times.
In your example given I can see a situation that isn't actually a risk to life (which comes under different rulings), but is still serious enough you need to take some action before waiting for Shabbat to end. A burst pipe would be a good example; it's not going to kill anyone but it could cause extremely serious damage if left. Asking for help rather than just picking the phone up and treating it like a regular day sorta makes logical sense in that context, though it's probably not what I'd choose to do.
Jewish laws only ever apply to Jews [1]; they have no expectation, want or desire for it to apply to anyone else, through conversion or otherwise. If your friend isn't Jewish then he's welcome to do what he wants. There is no damnation in the Christian sense for anyone, Jewish or otherwise. It's also possible to get into Jewish heaven without being Jewish, but you do have to obey a small subset [1] of the laws.
> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules?
Apparently, the consensus is that the God does not just approve of working around the rules, but actively _expects_ it. Otherwise the rules wouldn't have these loopholes, would they?
That sounds profoundly ignorant of human’s customs and cultural usages. Using "we" shows the orator includes himself in the group but the surprised tone "my god" has a bitter taste of despise.
I’m not Jewish but it’s easy to see similar mental gymnastics on myself or around. Remarking it on others before myself would show a great lack of introspection. When someone is surprised, the wise thinking is to question his own beliefs before the object of his discovery.
Which of my beliefs am I meant to question? That maybe there does exist an all-poweful, all-knowing being to whom it is somehow important that humans do not perform specific menial tasks on specific days of the week, since a lot of people seem to believe this?
It is easier to agree to donate your lungs because ethically they're only going to take your lungs if you die. So then you don't care anyway. If you agree to donate a kidney they may ask when you're alive, because you have two kidneys and you can survive (though with some reduction in capability) with just one. This is called Living Kidney Donation, you don't have to offer to do this, and even if you offer, and it's a match you don't have to go through with the donation but obviously there are huge psychological impacts from deciding to perhaps save somebody's life as a conscious choice at a non-negligible risk to your own.
Note that you're not "saving somebody's life" by donating a kidney. What you are doing, at best, is increasing their quality of life and even that is hard to quantify:
Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease. There are also risks, including the risks of surgery. After the transplant, you will need to take anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, for as long as your new kidney is working, which can have side effects. You will have a higher risk for infections and certain types of cancer.
Although most transplants are successful and last for many years, how long they last can vary from one person to the next. Depending on your age, many people will need more than one kidney transplant during a lifetime.
The majority of kidney patients with end-stage kidney disease do not simply die: they can survive several years on dialysis. As far as I can tell, most indeed do: only a minority of kidney patients ever get transplants.
Source: relative with kidney disease who would not accept a living donour kidney because of ethical concerns.
A friend had kidney failure and now has one of her husband's kidneys. It's really striking how much the immunosuppression sucks (a lot!) versus how much dialysis sucked (far more) for the period between her diagnosis and them being able to perform a transplant.
The US has a problem where there are a bunch of outfits whose income is derived specifically from dialysis, so for them transplants are bad business. Sure, the patient will (statistically) have a longer life and enjoy higher quality of life, but their income will be reduced so...
This results in a rather... muted endorsement of qualitatively better outcomes and where there's obviously also going to be an ethical component I'd say that's undesirable.
We all die. People with kidney disease die significantly sooner statistically if they do not receive a transplant, so this is the sense in which I mean saving a life.
Great! I am also about to donate my other kidney. The difference in the long term outcome of the patient between living and dead donation is significant enough for me to go through this. My total kidney function will drop to 50% and I will be sick for 2-3 weeks but if everything goes well I will be up to 70% after few months if the remaining kidney accomodates and back to work in about 4 weeks. Of course there are some other long term risks to consider. However, I probably would not agree on this if there was an abundant supply of working pig kidneys…
I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.
Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.
That patient died shortly thereafter. The condition is critical and there's a lot of immunological pressure put on the patient.
China is smart to study this in living cadavers first. It's much easier to find patients that aren't already on death's door, and there is no need to keep the patient alive. You can run experiment after experiment.
You can try a novel treatment on those but at the same time are limited by ethical concerns regarding pain and future survival (if the transplant "works", you are now in a tricky situation, as you can't easily do anything that has the potential to make the situation worse... and given it's uncharted territory, anything has the potential to make it worse).
Brain-dead people don't have such limitations. You don't have to worry about causing pain nor shortening potential survival, so you can try things that are likely to "kill" them (cause the transplant to fail, or other issues) and learn from the outcomes.
Fortunately determining brain death is a problem with a clear-cut answer with a clear line dividing “brain death” and “not brain death”. Right?
Part of it is a choice you make when choosing to donate your body for research. There's a chance brain death can be determined incorrectly (though in this situation it's likely the same determination will be used to withdraw life-support, research donation or not).
If I'm ever declared brain dead, I want scientists experimenting on me. That's a much better use than giving organs to just a handful of people. It pushes the salients forward for everyone.
They are extensively used in pharmacological research because they match real organs very well on the cellular level. But there is further research necessary to implement the large scale parts. E.g. in kidneys the actual kidney and the connection to the gall bladder forms separately and is then combined into an organ. That doesn't work, yet.
And in some cases nobody has the courage to actually use it. The list of reasons why a liver organoid couldn't be implanted into a live patient is growing very thin. Well, aside from funding (which is massive if it fails, at least the equivalent of a year's pay. 3 or 4 times a year's pay for a doctoral student).
I would like to point out that this research isn't especially badly treated. It has fared better than most programs. But it probably can't even be saved. The actual defunding happened 5 years ago and last year even the PI has moved on, and every doctoral student involved also has. I'm sure they'll answer questions on the subject if you ask, but you'll have to rebuild things from papers and email questions. There is a spinoff selling organoids to pharma, but tiny ones (think clusters of x0000 cells). If the research in scaling organoids to full sizes is restarted now, you can't really expect results the first year, maybe two at least.
It isn't just the US that is defunding science.
If your printer is already severely clogged and that is a major contributor to chronic ink level issues for your printer, apply few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto each of ink drawing ports(do NOT use acetone and/or ethanol; liquid form PFAS is better in narrow technical sense, IIRC). It will dissolve everything unwanted and its positive effects seem to last years, while being effectively harmless to electro-mechanical systems.
>However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant.
Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment.
The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients.
Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan4187
Most people will probably not remember this - it was the death of Kira's lover Bareil on DS9 - because it was almost throwaway, but it was one of those sparkling little ideas and questions Star Trek used to be filled with that has stayed with me life-long.
Genetically tweaked to be more compatible with the humans that might harvest their organs, but then they became a bit too human. Then scientists were like fuck it how far can we go with this. Hyperpigs.
Scorpio is not as interesting a character as I would like, but he's a good pig.
China is doing amazing work.
Of course it failed, but it's one step in a long journey.
Red tape aplenty.
The brain dead person was used as a living experiment, and they were watching for immunological response.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have never read of this happening in the US. There's far too much red tape.
My entire point is that China is experimenting on BRAIN DEAD living bodies as test tubes.
This is a way to accelerate much faster since there are far more brain dead patients and no effort needs to be made to keep the patient alive.
They're effectively using these bodies as lab experiments. It's an incredibly smart move by China.
Without the red tape and with an endless stream of brain dead bodies, they're going to leapfrog America quickly with this technology.
In addition, some scholars (a minority) argue that perhaps one reason behind pork consumption being forbidden is due to its utility in human transplantation (thereby making it “sacred”).
Good paper on the history of human/animal transplantation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3246856/
In the 1920s, Voronoff advocated the transplantation of slices of chimpanzee testis into aged men whose “zest for life” was deteriorating, believing that the hormones produced by the testis would rejuvenate his patients.
[1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8.
https://quran.com/2?startingVerse=173
are you therefore required to answer the phone, because who else would be calling on shabat?
I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
For a great example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv . Look carefully and you'll see these in Jewish areas of NYC like Williamsburg.
There's a lot of crossover between Judaism and DnD player mentality. You're very much encouraged to learn the source material, the commentary and to discuss and debate it. Workarounds don't actually break the rules; and you need to put a lot of study into doing them properly.
Sometimes you need to take a sensible decision and choose to just flat out break the rules. In those situations one is encouraged to do so in an uncommon or abnormal way so it doesn't become habitual. This makes sense to me - I didn't smoke inside for the first 3 years of moving into my house, but the first time I did break that rule it made breaking it much easier the second, third, or subsequent times.
In your example given I can see a situation that isn't actually a risk to life (which comes under different rulings), but is still serious enough you need to take some action before waiting for Shabbat to end. A burst pipe would be a good example; it's not going to kill anyone but it could cause extremely serious damage if left. Asking for help rather than just picking the phone up and treating it like a regular day sorta makes logical sense in that context, though it's probably not what I'd choose to do.
Jewish laws only ever apply to Jews [1]; they have no expectation, want or desire for it to apply to anyone else, through conversion or otherwise. If your friend isn't Jewish then he's welcome to do what he wants. There is no damnation in the Christian sense for anyone, Jewish or otherwise. It's also possible to get into Jewish heaven without being Jewish, but you do have to obey a small subset [1] of the laws.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
Apparently, the consensus is that the God does not just approve of working around the rules, but actively _expects_ it. Otherwise the rules wouldn't have these loopholes, would they?
I’m not Jewish but it’s easy to see similar mental gymnastics on myself or around. Remarking it on others before myself would show a great lack of introspection. When someone is surprised, the wise thinking is to question his own beliefs before the object of his discovery.
Another time he asked my friend to tear him some toilet paper
The current Israeli administration is governed by hard line Jewish leaders and don’t seem to abide by pikachu at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh
Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease. There are also risks, including the risks of surgery. After the transplant, you will need to take anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, for as long as your new kidney is working, which can have side effects. You will have a higher risk for infections and certain types of cancer.
Although most transplants are successful and last for many years, how long they last can vary from one person to the next. Depending on your age, many people will need more than one kidney transplant during a lifetime.
https://www.kidney.org/kidney-topics/kidney-transplant
The majority of kidney patients with end-stage kidney disease do not simply die: they can survive several years on dialysis. As far as I can tell, most indeed do: only a minority of kidney patients ever get transplants.
Source: relative with kidney disease who would not accept a living donour kidney because of ethical concerns.
The US has a problem where there are a bunch of outfits whose income is derived specifically from dialysis, so for them transplants are bad business. Sure, the patient will (statistically) have a longer life and enjoy higher quality of life, but their income will be reduced so...
This results in a rather... muted endorsement of qualitatively better outcomes and where there's obviously also going to be an ethical component I'd say that's undesirable.
We all die. People with kidney disease die significantly sooner statistically if they do not receive a transplant, so this is the sense in which I mean saving a life.