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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 mcgrew on Friday August 14 2015, @08:17PM
Any time I hear the word "futurist" attached to someone, I snicker and my estimation of him or her goes down. I'll have a journal about this when I post the futurist essay by Hugo Gernsback, written in 1926 (two decades before the word "futurist" was used as it is today). It's the last item in Yesterday's Tomorrows.
When I was a kid, futurists were promising flying cars by this century, but nobody had a clue that we would have photography without film, phones in our pockets, or the internet (Except Murray Leinster, and I doubt he thought his fiction was prophetic).
When a futurist says something, think about the Gernsback essay (It will be up at my web site shortly). He says in his essay "The chances are that if someone runs across this fifty years from now, he will severely condemn the writer of this for his great lack of imagination, for, no matter how wild the predictions may seem now, they will look very tame fifty years hence."
That was not nearly as absurd as some of his predictions, but was 100% incorrect anyway.
In the foreword to the book and introduction to Gernsback's essay I have a lot more to say about futurism.
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