SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Donated human organs are in such short supply that thousands of people die waiting for one every year. U.S. researchers have been shattering records in xenotransplantation, or between-species organ transplants.
The researchers say they have kept a pig heart alive in a baboon for 945 days and also reported the longest-ever kidney swap between these species, lasting 136 days. The experiments used organs from pigs "humanized" with the addition of as many as five human genes, a strategy designed to stop organ rejection.
The GM pigs are being produced in Blacksburg, Virginia, by Revivicor, a division of the biotechnology company United Therapeutics. That company's founder and co-CEO, Martine Rothblatt, is a noted futurist who four years ago began spending millions to supply researchers with pig organs and has quickly become the largest commercial backer of xenotransplantation research.
Rothblatt says her goal is to create "an unlimited supply of transplantable organs" and to carry out the first successful pig-to-human lung transplant within a few years. One of her daughters has a usually fatal lung condition called pulmonary arterial hypertension. In addition to GM pigs, her company is carrying out research on tissue-engineered lungs and cryopreservation of organs. "We're turning xenotransplantation from what looked like a kind of Apollo-level problem into just an engineering task," she says.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday August 14 2015, @10:35PM
My evil black cat is sentient. There is no doubt about it. She, like all other house cats, is very good at training her human to do what she wants done to her. I am her slave.
There is a scene in a Star Trek novel I read decades ago when I regularly read those things. It was an encounter between a human with a cat on his shoulder and a Kzinti-like technological sophisticated cat species. The Kzinti-like creature was horrified that the human would enslave a fellow sentient creature. The human replied that he was not certain who was enslaving whom.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.