Surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man, the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the breakthrough offers hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose kidneys have failed.
I'm personally looking forward to new eyes from a genetically engineered hawk and a new nose from a genetically engineered bloodhound. Someday.
I want claws from a genetically engineered cat. Swipe!!
When he eats a ham sandwich is it now technically cannibalism?
And how does this affect people whose religions forbid pork?
Forget the eyes of a hawk, I want the compound eyes of the mantis shrimp. Contact lens to hide my freakish eyes, naturally.
ADD: I don't think this is the future of organ transplantation; the future is farmed organs in a stem-cell rich solution, fed by your own genetic material and blood.
You do know that the choice of a pig is not random? Pigs share important traits with us (unlike bloodhounds) which raises the chances of success.
The patient in question is probably a dialysis patient for whom no matching human kidney is available; so he dedided to take the risk. Chances that this experiment fails are probably quite high.
I assume if the kidney is rejected he can go back on dialysis? No reason not to try.
This isn't surprising. Check this out: http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html
Got any genetically engineered horses? Asking for a friend.
Getting the nose of a bloodhound or the eyes of a hawk could actually work, somewhat.
I saw a documentary in which they put some cells for cones in a monkey which provided color sensitivity it didn’t natively have. After they established themselves they tested the creature and found it could now see the new color.
So, maybe not as perfectly as a bloodhound but someday we may get new sensors and our brains will adapt.
"If successful."
If successful.
And somewhere in a hospital bed is a real human who is being put through completely novel kinds of Hell on the very small chance that something might be learned.
More than any other single thing, it is our depraved indifference to collateral damage that condemns us. Most of us do not even have a usable notion of what collateral damage is, and only a handful of individuals in the world have the ethical literacy to know that it is a bad thing. For everyone else, it is just one flounce after another, while the trail of blood and wreckage mounts to the sky.
Lighten up, Francis. This person is undoubtedly a volunteer.
Yeah, sure. The patient in the experiment could just choose to die with dignity when no suitable human transplant kidney is available, right?
It may be a little known fact, but humans have been slaughtering hogs for their parts. for thousands of years; have even brought therm along on trips throughout the world, often by boat. The hog parts saved lives also -- by serving as a food source.
If anything, this is a more noble death for the pig. They died to save a human life, whereas their kin mostly die for delicious pork ribs.
Perhaps this donor is doing double duty.
I don't know about this person but the last person who volunteered for this procedure was not eligible for a donor kidney transplant because they had repeatedly shown that they would not reliably take their prescribed medications. Obviously for a transplant the anti-rejection drugs are very important. The transplant review board made the decision that the other people on the transplant list who did not have that problem should go to the head of the list.
I spent four years at a company trying to make this work without the genetically engineered pigs. We all knew this was the only way forward, but ran out of financing before we could get there.
The idea has been around for a while, but pig kidneys had some retroviruses that were bad news and made implantation impossible. With genetic engineering, it now seems to be possible to knock out the retroviruses and maybe do it successfully - "successful" in the sense that the person can now live longer with a kidney, even if they have to take rejection drugs for the rest of their life. Beats dialysis.
Out of the three main approaches to doing better than dialysis (artificial kidney, pig kidney, lab-grown kidney), pig kidney is not the one I'd guess might win out. But it seems it might - lab-grown kidneys are still far off, and we don't seem to be any closer to an artificial kidney.
Speaking of which, given how widespread kidney disease is and the prevailing dominance of kidneys among donor organs needed, how come there isn't a big national program to create an artificial kidney to replace the need for long-term dialysis?
While the retroviruses represented a long term risk, it was the overwhelming immune reaction that prevented this from working until now. Anti-gal antibodies in our bodies can destroy a pig organ in minutes/hours.
This country has been using pig heart valves for years.
You'll look real uptown with those.