A pig kidney has been successfully transplanted into a human for the first time | Hacker News Reader

A pig kidney has been successfully transplanted into a human for the first time

economist.com

51 pointssiva765 comments

I'm not saying it's rational, but I have some sort of deep seated disgust for these types of transplants.

Intellectually I know we don't have enough donations to match the demand and in my own life I've given blood and signed up to be an organ donor, but there is something across species like this that just makes my stomach kinda turn.

You would not feel this way if you were a recipient in dire need.

As someone who had to wait painfully long for a transplant, I would have much preferred a pig organ sooner (and possibly of higher quality).

I actually disagree with you. I think I would still feel disgusted but I would get over it and get the organ anyway. It's not a rational thing.

Why do you think that is? It doesn’t bother me, and I’m genuinely curious why you (and I’m sure others) might feel that way.

Honestly, maybe it has something to do with a similar revulsion I have to bestiality. I think some of these things are hardwired.

I think it's the body horror aspect, thinking that there is a living pig-organ inside of you keeping you alive. That would freak anyone out if they thought about it.

At the same time though, if it were meant to be a temporary life-saving procedure to keep you at optimal health for as long as possible then it makes more sense. I would feel a similar (if less-alien) feeling about having a deceased person's kidney in me as well, after all.

I hope I am fortunate enough to never have to make that decision while still living a long and fruitful life.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty repulsed by bestiality as well.

We should welcome this kind of research, because it dries out Chinese organ harvesting[1] and criminal organ markets:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

It's a product of your personality and your time. People in olden times also used to be terrified at the thought of eating tomatoes or touching a light switch, but it's only a problem for adults who are generally more ossified in their worldviews. Children and future generations generally regard anything as normal. If I needed a kidney you can bet I'd take a pig, monkey, dog, whatever kidney I could get if it increased my chances at a healthy life.

It’s weird that you could have a visceral reaction to the conceptual notion of something that has nothing to do with you. Similar to how it’s weird that people’s stomach churn when thinking about abortion despite never having one, or how people are against gay marriage despite not being gay. Really unhealthy IMO

>It’s weird that you could have a visceral reaction to the conceptual notion of something that has nothing to do with you.

Visceral reactions are quite common. How about stories and notions of rape, murder, infanticide, and slavery?

Something doesn’t have to involve you to trigger a visceral response. I’m viscerally disgusted by many atrocities around the world but it’s not as if I’m at all involved in them.

Do you feel similar with artificially grown organs? Since they were never part of a real human?

I don't. I would prefer that to the other, honestly, or even over one that came from a currently-deceased person.

Maybe they could even use my own cells to make the organ. Then it's just my kidney 2.0. That's much easier to digest mentally.

That being said, I'm for finding medical advancements that will extend and improve human life, even if that advancement comes from animal organs (at least temporarily). For me the goal is to decrease suffering. I can deal with a little revulsion to the method as for me the end definitely justifies the means.

Not quite "into".

The pig kidney was attached outside the body via two large blood vessels, on an unresponsive organ donor who was going off life support.

Think of the ethics behind a live untested xenotransplant! But it's exciting that they got such promising results.

I wonder how much of the difficulty was in performing the transplant itself, and how much was in justifying the procedure (i.e. working out the ethics).

There must be a lot of experimental procedures ruled out on ethical grounds because they are untested and therefore are too dangerous to be tested. How common is this type of Catch-22 situation, and how is the deadlock typically broken?

> how is the deadlock typically broken

A war breaks out and human life becomes less important, or someone/some government does it in secret, or there is something potentially catastrophic that allows some rules to loosen up a bit (like a pandemic).

I've come to think the modern medical "ethics" and "Ethicist" are a huge problem.

That gatekeeping kills a lot of people.

In Poland, any major medical study on living patients must be approved by bioethics commission of local medical self-government.

Somehow, almost all of them have Catholic priest as member. He studied ethics on Catholic university, so he is "qualified".

It does seem that "ethicist" is a reinvention of the priest concept for a secular community.

There's a Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episode featuring this idea (I'm rewatching the series right now so this was oddly timely) - the idea was a company genetically modified a pig to grow up a set of your own organs and keep the pig around in case you needed them as a type of insurance policy.

Which did get me wondering where we'd got to with xenotransplantation and it looks like this is very much the result of research in that direction: the pig was genetically modified to reduce the chances of rejection.

Good to see we're still doing this research, since bioprinted or pure lab-grown organs are by no means a sure-thing.

I'm guessing they themselves copied from Margaret Atwood who wrote exactly the same idea in Oryx and Crake (2003)

GitS did it first: it was mentioned in the manga (90s) and was adapted as part of season 1 of SAC (2002).

Also, it seems the overall idea isn’t new: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghost_in_the_Shell/comments/6msddc/...

I remember that episode. The CEO of the pig company was a brain living in a metal box with legs.

Here's the full article for anyone who wants to read it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211021121804id_/https://www.ec...

I've been hearing about this coming from my nephrologist for many years. I have stage 3 kidney disease and he isn't concerned about it because by the time I need a transplant, they will be growing kidneys from my cells in pigs. Exciting to see another step forward.

NIH from March:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8004187/

I'd totally dig having a couple extra eyes giving me the vision of a mantis shrimp.

As you once did the vacuous Rom, grant us eyes, grant us eyes!

I'd like my eyes on the outside of my skull, thanks.

Having high-res eyes on fingers would be handy for soldering SMD's

How would they be integrated into your existing vision? They wouldn't be fixed in relation to your original eyes, so wouldn't that give you a headache?

Why not put cameras on your fingers and link them to smartglasses?

It’d probably integrate with the nerves on the skin and I’d need to learn how to see and interpret what those eyes are seeing. It’d be a fascinating experiment when the technology exists.

> Why not put cameras on your fingers and link them to smartglasses?

For practical purposes, I’m sticking with a magnifier for now.

Is this a thing because we cannot grow human organs or because government prohibits that in developed countries? Perfect match is something grown from your own DNA. No risk of rejection, no need to drink immunosuppressants till end of life.

If we could do that we absolutely would, and people are working on it, but we're not there yet.

Heh, pigoons from Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)!

This is GREAT news for people with kidney disease. I hope we will see this process improve and make transplants possible for more people.

Note that this is a kidney from a genetically altered line of pigs, CRISPR engineered to not be rejected by the human body.

Much work probably remains.

would it count as cannibalism to eat such kidney?

That's more complicated than it might seem at first glance.

AIUI, the modification to the pig was "just" "let's remove the genes that result in this one sugar that lots of animals but not some apes and humans have" (which is also the thing that you develop an allergy to if you're bitten by the Lone Star tick, incidentally), not "let's stick a bunch of human genes in", so _these_ organs wouldn't have much tinge for cannibalism unless you ate them post-transplant. (This article doesn't, but another one mentions one of the original intended use cases for the GalSafe pigs _is_ for eating, including by people who have the Alpha-Gal allergy.)

They're _also_ working on pigs with one or more human genes spliced in for better compatibility, but that's not these.

This question will be even more pertinent in 2050, when instead of modifying pigs so that they're more similar to us, we'll be modifying Homo sapiens to stunt their intelligent.

Those Homo stulti will have neither the agency nor the ability to decide their fate, but their organs will drastically improve the quality of life for sapiens.

Interesting times :)

that's too grim, i think probability is much larger that we figure out a way to grow human organs inside pigs before we turn actual humans into mindless incubators.

Perhaps it sounds grim, but it seems no different than what we're doing.

Do we base our morality on the patterns of the synapses or the shape of the bodies? The former makes more sense to me.

To be absolutely clear, this is not an endorsement of modifying humans for the purpose of farming organs. It's more about highlighting the thin moral line that relies on the body shape.

The researchers in the article just modified the pig's DNA so it doesn't express a particular sugar that the human immune system doesn't like. No human DNA goes in the pig.

but then the act of depriving a being of a certain pattern of synapses that would make it immoral to harm is immoral in itself.

hyperpigs are people too!

No but there has to be a new word invented

...Cultured Meat?

Would this be halal or kosher?

The organ has been genetically modified from what a natural pig organ would be like.

If not, would it be difficult to grow organs in some other animal?

Further why not use gorillas or another animal that to me would seem closet to human?

It would be halal if it wasn't from a pig I think.

https://www.islamweb.net/en/fatwa/82240/organ-transplantatio...

But it might actually be kosher.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10618731/

I think the issue with Kosher is null if it involves saving a life, right? If you're Orthodox Jewish and starving to death you would not be committing a sin to eat pork sausage.

Of course, that's what your link says, so my addition is null, but still. There is some common sense in the Jewish faith.

damn, when are we going to see a Michael Bay The Island-esque film about an underground cloning facility through the eyes of a pig who lives there?

"My Name Is Peter Parker, And I've Been Pig-Man Since I Was 15 Years Old."

Peter Porker*

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