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: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday August 14 2015, @04:46AM
Well, I feel a similar cringe with the idea of slaughtering pigs for human pleasure, and I put my feelings into practice over ten years ago by giving up eating mammals.
As for sentience, pigs are undoubtedly sentient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience [wikipedia.org]
Anyone who has ever had a dog or cat, especially two or more at once, would recognize that even if they don't think in the same way or the same level as we do, they certainly have subjective preferences for any number of things (food, games, how they like to be petted, emotional responses to human mood/behavior). Even a sense of fairness. I've watched my cats groom one another, one will start on another, then stop, and position him or herself toward the other to get the same treatment back. The body language is unquestionable. I've petted my cats, and afterward, they've had a go at licking my hair. I don't particularly like that, but I recognize that sense of reciprocity. For example, after you've bought a friend a drink, that friend probably buys one for you because for most people, it feels good to return the favor. It's been reversed too, with the cat starting by licking my hair, then asking me to pet him or her. That's proactively being nice to get something nice in return, not just a reaction to me being nice. That's planning.
I'm not saying that humans and other mammals are identical -- it too is obvious we are not -- but when there is a great deal of commonality even between a big brained human and walnut brained housecat, that's instructive. Anyway, I figure the popularity of failing to make these observations, is because it makes it easier to ignore the daily suffering we inflict on other sentient beings.
Finally, I'm not pure. I do eat meat outside my class, but eating within mammalia feels cannibalistic due to the blatant similarities I share with other mammals.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday August 14 2015, @05:00AM
While I haven't chosen that path, I understand it. Getting a viable organ for transplant though is worth a lot more than a few tasty meals.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday August 14 2015, @06:19AM
Why not just grow people?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 14 2015, @08:54PM
Uh, we do. They're called "babies".
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday August 15 2015, @04:22AM
Why not grow people in tiny cubbies and then harvest organs from them at say 16 years?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday August 15 2015, @01:52AM
I saw that movie.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 14 2015, @08:52PM
Even flies have been shown to know fear. It would seem that for any animal no matter what kind, fear and some measure of sentience is necessary for survival.
My grandparents had a small farm with a large garden, pigs, chickens, cows, a mule, a dog... I forget what else. Grandpa had no problem slaughtering a pig, except for the stench -- he had a meat plant butcher them after that. Pigs stink even worse cut open than they do when they're alive.
But the first cow he butchered was his last; he cried as he put the .22 into its brain. "It was the way she looked at me," he said.
All animals have feelings, and all animals have some degree of sentience. Sentience is a chemical phenomenon, as is everything else about life.
Like pigs, humans are omnivores. We need to eat both plants and animals, unlike cows and wolves. And everything dies. And who's to say plants have no feelings? How could you even test a hypothesis like that?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday August 15 2015, @01:42AM
It's surprising to hear your grandfather was attached to his farm animals. My friends from farming families were punished for treating the food animals like pets, and their friends were highly discouraged from doing so as well when they came over. It seemed hard to me to differentiate the animals like that, because I love animals. But it was a very bright line in their minds. On the one side, love and affection, on the other cold, clinical detachment.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:37PM
It wasn't that he was attached to the cow, it was just a cow. It was the way it looked at him.
OTOH a friend of mine used to raise hogs, and one bit both him and his son. He says that pig was the best tasting pork he ever ate.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(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.