U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient | Hacker News Reader

U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

apnews.com

804 pointsdanso701 comments

You might be asking, why a pig? I don't know, but forever ago I wrote software for a cardiovascular imaging lab and pigs were their primary test subjects. I was like, "why pigs?" and the PI was like, "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."

Pigs are really common in biomedical testing. They are physically a similar size and weight to humans. They also reach maturity in about 6 months. Much cheaper to raise than primates, and more likely to get approval for testing. My friends in biomed grad school named one of theirs cyber pig because it has about 30 different experiments ran on it before it was killed, and afterwards it was portioned out for further tests.

Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature. Weirder how it can be said without a sympathetic or concerned response. I hope we can someday move beyond seeing animals as a mere resource.

From what I heard, the pig lived a relativity good life. It was well cared for by the large animal veterinary school on campus. Had more space and better food than any factory raised pig. All experiments passed an ethics review. The pig was anesthetized before any procedure. The number of experiments may sound barbaric on the surface, but it was to reduce the overall number of pigs used in trials.

Modern medicine would not be possible without animal trials. Lab-on-a-chips may reduce the need in the future, but animals will still be required for device testing that needs an entire structure, not just a few cells. Different people may weigh the ethical dilemma differently, but when it's your loved dying due a heart defect I am willing to bet you will still choose a treatment tested on animals.

It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. Our bodies produce all of the enzymes, such as protease and lipase, necessary for the breakdown and absorption of meat.

The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" and become "vegetarians" effectively masking our more savage nature.

Make no mistake, You are biologically designed to kill and eat flesh. And if you can kill it and eat it, of course you can experiment on it.

I think for things like this, being dispassionate is a coping mechanism. If you engage the sympathy part of your brain, you won’t be able to do it. If you don’t do it, then humans die instead.

Are you... are you serious?

The day that every statement of unfortunate fact has to be prefaced by an expression of emotional disapproval...

that is the day I officially give up on our already laughable species.

No one should have to explicitly state their disapproval of something unpleasant -- it can go without saying.

And I, for one, prefer to get facts and information without a person's opinion on the matter -- nothing could be less important to me than a given individual's emotional perspective on a matter.

It's of no interest to me how other people feel about something in forming my own judgements, and there's a high probability that their "feelings" will be poorly justified/based on misunderstanding/entirely insincere/etc.

I care about the data, and I'll form my own opinion on it.

The last thing I need to know about the subject of the pig used for many experiments...

is that some random person online who shared the information with me...

...disapproves of the pig's unfortunate journey.

I know someone who worked with mice but switched fields, he explained he could no longer do it because even though they are heavily inbred for research, each one had a different personality when in his hands and killing all of them took too much of a mental toll after years of work.

I don’t think it’s weird at all. If a million people were to die of COVID tomorrow, I wouldn’t really care emotionally. They all had their own life narratives, emotions and intelligence. Yet it wouldn’t phase me one bit. Perhaps intellectually I would have some compassion for them, and would hope they didn’t suffer.

On the other hand, if a close relative or friend dies, I would mourn them immensely. Similarly, if I had a pet pig I would mourn that individual pig a lot. But a lab pig that’s used for experiments not so much.

Until scarcity is solved everything is a resource.

Thank you for saying that. I'm still shocked how deep such "mental illusions" can go. But it's also dangerous thing to say, because it triggers "internal contradiction" error in most people and you get to experience people's justifications and/or attacks as a form of defense. One of those things that are invisible now but will be shocking from historical perspective.

I find such a remark weird given that "you" are serving such "helpless" creatures at your favorite restaurant. I think it's the ultimate hypocrisy. Not to mention that we have a situation where helpless creatures are sacrificed for the science/common good of human beings and the other situation where they are murdered for the taste of their meat & bones.

Let’s just first take care of our own, shall we? Band together as humans caring for humans, and then perhaps the pigs?

I deal with this same way I deal with not being vegetarian. I just accept that I am not a good man.

my thoughts exactly, these animals are even smarter than dogs and according to some studies smarter than 3-year old children, which makes this even sadder. We have one as a pet in the family and they're so chill.

I think it's good that you can have empathy for the animal but you could also sympathize with the people (inc children) that may someday have such a heart as their only option.

Everybody wants to move beyond animals, a lot of research is being done on Organs on a Chip etc, but until then, we have animals. See them like the nuclear powerplants that we use instead of coal, until we can finally move to fully renewable energy.

Sometime I ask myself, how many mice or pigs would I kill to save my child? And my answer is: As many as it takes.

I've always found this particular schism really strange. People will be passionately protective of one type of animal while being perfectly happy for another as-far-as-I-can-see-equivalent animal to be factory farmed and fried for breakfast. There's a lot of interesting mental calisthenics that goes on in mammal brains to allow our social, empathic behaviours to coexist with predator behaviours.

If this happens, I hope it happens decades after we switch to factory produced meat.

There is a multiple orders of magnitude more benefit from using animals for medical research and medical care than from using them as food. I realize our psychology makes us empathize with whatever case we have in front of us right now, but when it comes to orders of magnitude difference and human lives, I'd much prefer we better control our empathy.

I hope so too, but let's start with the highest impact interventions like stopping the gassing of pigs with CO2 which causes immense pain at an extremely large scale.

It's upsetting in an absolute sense that we experiment on pigs like this, but at least that was only 1 pig and the benefits of that would be much more than if it was just used for food.

Sadly I think if or when pig heart transplants are successful in humans, pigs will be commoditized even further, if that is even possible. Poor creatures :(

Not a reason to stop this research in my opinion but I agree with the comment I’m responding to - wish people could care for the animals we treat as test subjects, seems somewhat cruel to not do so

"In 2020.. Total commercial hog slaughter was 131.563 million head" - US FDA Report. I appreciate your sentiment, but if you would like to direct effort toward this cause, perhaps the food industry would be a better starting point.

I agree with the sentiment, but you don’t have to attribute human characteristics to animals in order to make the case that this and much else of our contemporary relationship with nature is inhumane (meaning: against human nature).

I assume the experiments were approved by some ethics board so that they weren't just for fun. Experiments on animals are justified if we think we can save human lives with that knowledge.

It's not weird, humans have a lot of different perspectives on life (or our simulator). It is a bit weird to me also though.

What do you propose is the solution?

Some of us need to learn to see one another as more than mere resource first.

We eat them. We're simply hard wired to use them as a resource.

Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.

If only this pig had had the opportunity to live in the wild where it could cannibalize it's young and destroy ecosystems.

Looking at this thread what I find strange is how we try to justify things to ourselves. How we come up with these frameworks to justify our behavior is the strange thing to me.

On one hand we have the vegans who deny their very biological nature in order to fulfill the precept: "thou shall not kill." Vegans don't eat meat eat even though the human body is clearly a machine designed to eat meat. Why deny nature?

On the other hand we have carnivores who try to justify the fact that they are clearly killing another living creature that has feelings, emotions and intelligence not too far away from humans. How can you justify the mass slaughter and experimentation on pigs but not on humans? Experiments on the Jews during the holocaust could very much save more lives than testing these things on pigs as pigs are but a crude model of the human body.

Personally, I don't try to reconcile my morality. I know there's a moral part of my brain evolved to make sense of the prehistoric world where pigs didn't have feelings and the only people that mattered were those that were in my tribe. It's only in modern times that we now live in a global tribe where science and resources allow us to worry about the emotions of a pig. So what am I? I'm an evil motherfucker who eats the flesh of an innocent pig who didn't have to die...

Either way we're just humans on a ball of dust encircling a tiny spark that's going to go super nova anyway. Who cares. Math is suppose to make sense. Morality is not.

Because it helps save humans

I assume you're vegan then.

I don't see them as intelligent

Bit of a tangent: I read the article to my wife and she mentioned that there is an episode of Grey's Anatomy where they wanted to perform a transplant of a pig's bowels but the Jewish (or Muslim?) lady refused. Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.

That was actually an inaccurate portrayal of Jewish law and Orthodox Jews "condemned the episode": https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-kosh...

“[The] prohibition against touching pigs applied only when Jews were on their way to Jerusalem to observe the three pilgrimage festivals”, “Even on the way to Jerusalem, Jews were only prohibited from touching the flesh, that is, the meat of a pig. According to halacha (Jewish law) the skin of an animal does not transmit impurities”.

“Beyond that, there’s a very important tenet of Judaism called pikuach nefesh, or, saving a life. [Most Jewish laws] can and in fact should be violated in order to save a person’s life”.

Quotes from link in sibling comment by mizzao.

Kosher rules are against eating pig meat. You can have a pig heart valve or heart, especially to save a life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh

Not that everyone would do it.

> Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr

10,000 Christians per year (excluding Congo's civil war, hence the article's title), it seems: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24864587

And Muslims in China don't fare particularly well, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims#China_2

> Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.

I guess according to a person of faith this becomes a choice between "afterlife" and "life".

For even more of a tangent, there is a South Park episode (S16E9) with a heart transplant from pig to human

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Bar_(South_Park)

Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions all the time on religious grounds. It might seem silly to you or me, but, to them, it would be sacrificing their eternal life for their limited life on Earth.

> Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.

The belief in the right to a predictably long life is a new idea barely a few centuries old at most. Not that I'm personally complaining, but the statement did make me think, the value of living longer for everyone is not self-evident (at least from where I am standing), and the presumption that it is seems in itself dogmatic.

Actually, I could suggest a few non-faith approaches to rationalize the benefit of early death

I'd want to question why I'm doing it. For example do I have kids I need to stick around to support? Or am I just going to be discharged to mostly play video games, alone? Because I don't see a need to extend that life.

Then I'd want to think about what it symbolizes. Is it really so irrational to just let my body die when my God-given guts fail instead of depending on the hands of man to possibly convert my body into an abomination just to keep me alive here longer?

I read in a book about a monk refusing to get a pacemaker, saying "Imagine, God is calling me up to Heaven because it's my time, and this machine holds me down here on earth!" and while I may not be a monk, his decision seemed fairly wise to me. So I already have an example of a devout faithful man eschewing a life extending operation that involved no replacement of human with animal parts.

On the axiom that betraying such faith leads to æternal damnation in the afterlife, it seems a strategic choice to me.

It would perhaps only be strange that a man might hold such an axion, not that he acts in accordance with it.

To me it looks like some kind of natural selection. I wonder what would these folks do if a deadly pandemic would hit us and the only cure would be to use some pork "formula" injection.

How do you make sure all those experiments don't interfere with eachother?

From what I remember most of the experiments where more material based like healing a bone, or replacing a joint, or some sort of implant. So you could have things interfere, but it wasn’t like drug trials which would effect the entire body.

You can’t really. You test in naive animals when critical, but repeating an experiment or needing a quick binary read-out, you can use non-naive successfully.

If they reach maturity in 6 months only then might it make sense to create humanized pigs (with crucial genes replaced by human DNA) that are cultivated specifically for their organs? Fairly cruel I know, but these pigs would be treated better than pigs cultivated for meat, that's for sure.

Go read "Oryx and Crake"

Are pigs used in biomedical testing ever butchered for their meat?

Seems like we kill a lot of pigs every year anyways. Would be neat if we could get multiple birds from one stone - for experiments where there isn't a risk of making the meat dangerous at least.

I doubt it. All disposed of according to hazardous waste rules. Also, large study animals are so important that most tissues and bits are studied during necropsy in close details with retained material kept frozen for years.

It depends! One of my kids is a biochemist wrapping up his degree this semester in a vet-med lab (send job opportunities!). He's done one study with pigs, where they were developing new enteric vaccines. At the conclusion of the study there's nothing wrong with the pigs --- they're just hyper-vaccinated --- but without a place to send them, all they can do is euthanize. He spent a week or two trying to re-home the pigs, but he's at UIUC and there is no pig shortage in the area. You could have taken those pigs for free and ultimately butchered them.

Euthanizing research pigs seems especially difficult. I'm really into butchery --- invested in a butcher in the area --- and would happily attend a slaughter. But the circumstances attending euthanizing research pigs are tricky; the pigs are all in a common area, and they're social animals and know something's up when you put one of them down. It messed with the boy.

I wonder how long will it extend the life of a human after transplanted with Pig's heart. 5 years? Then I guess after every x years, they need new transplant? Though better than death, it is a painful stress.

you recover somewhat, just in time to have another surgery and another lengthy recovery period...not sure whether it is a good life, or a peaceful death is better.

truly disgustingly cruel how humans treat other sentient beings as irrelevant and inanimate. as a species, we kinda are underperforming the compassion we are capable of, except in self serving situations.

It's a pig.

What is it about primates that make them expensive?

Other than expenses, they develop much more slowly. As per another commenter a 6 months old pig is practically adult, while it is much longer for most primates.

Primates typically need to be raised in very large colonies to be healthy, and to be able to take from the colony without damaging it, there need to be many many primates (some colonies are in the hundreds).

The Rhesus monkey is a popular one for biomedical testing for a variety of reasons.

Supply? Pigs are both abundant and easily found in the United States. There aren't primate breeding lots. You need to go into a jungle to find them.

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. - Winston S. Churchill

I am be responsible for purposefully creating a famine in India killing 3 million people and still be quoted as a badass in the future - Winston S. Churchill

I don't think the Bengal famine is that simple, certainly not to say "purposefully creating"...

What is your point? Can't quote a former president if they did "bad" things?

I was only recently acquainted with the idea that there are many people on the internet who become very angry that some people eat dog meat, but do not with say cow meat or pig meat. — I find this rather strange and do not understand this.

It's all cognitive dissonance in the end. People are quite happy to have illogical and inconsistent beliefs because it lets them remain entirely ethical in their heads.

They will even become hostile when you challenge this because you are threatening the foundation of their ethics and mental health.

Otoh, relating to something is based on itself. It's a choice, not an obligation. In one ethical framework you're right, it's irrational to treat dogs better than pigs. In another, both lives are unimportant, but one picks dogs one level up for their utility. Inanimate objects also "experience" that. When you're sawing a plank, it's woodwork. When you're sawing a hammer, it's disrespect to the tool.

Dogs are carnivores. It is incredibly inefficient to raise dogs for meat, because you have to feed them meat to do so.

This pretty obviously isn't what people are principally reacting too, but it is massively understated when people get into "why do we eat A and not B?"

This doesn't seem to explain the reaction to even the smallest amount. I don't believe for a second that even 1% of the anger is because the consumer has wasted resources on their food. Or people would be furious about beef when chicken is massively more efficient.

> Dogs are carnivores.

Omnivores, not carnivores.

Ref: https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Canis_lupus_familiaris/

Please let's not pretend to ignore that some species are more "human like" than others.

- Plants are less "human like" than insects - Insects are less "human like" than sharks - Sharks are less "human like" than pigs - Pigs are less "human like" than dogs - Dogs are less "human like" than primates - Primates are less "human like" than humans

Pretending that this is is irrelevant doesn't help discourse.

And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.

Since dogs have been specifically bred to be very close to humans (being companions, living in the home, etc.) whereas pigs and cows have been bred to be eaten, this shouldn't be surprising.

> And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.

I honestly find it a very strange idea to say dogs are more human like than pigs.

Have you ever socialized with a pig? It is immediately clear to me that they display intelligence and emotional awareness of a far higher level than dogs. With pigs, it almost feels as though they are mute humans, trying to communicate in some way but being unable to do so due to an inability to speak, similar to dolphins and nonhuman apes. — They are also inquisitive creatures that inspect their environment and seem to apply some level of cognition to it that I never saw in dogs.

It's typically a North American - or sometimes Western European problem. As people become more lonely, they rely more on their companion pets. But ignore the obvious contradiction that they eat pigs, chickens or cows each day.

I'm not sure anyone else really worries about it from what I've seen, having traveled around.

Dog = carnivore domesticated as ally(superior smell/high speed etc)

Cow = herbivore domesticated for milk/meat

Eating dogs is terribly inefficient since they are carnivores. Seems fairly obvious that hunter gathers wouldn't have typically done this, and that it is a recent thing in regions that had famines & excess stray dogs.

Inefficiency wouldn't matter for hunter-gatherers, as they're not the ones that feed the animal (they hunt, don't farm). Also pretty sure that dog-eating isn't a recent things, I don't see why people "back then" wouldn't eat stray dogs in periods of low resource.

More importantly, inefficiency most definitely isn't the reason for which people on the internet "become very angry" at the idea of eating dog.

it’s just a lifetime of conditioning really

I also remember reading about a criminal defence attorney who did not handle cases involving sex crimes.

Apparently he was fine with defending murder suspects, but not suspects charged with even street groping. Or Gerard Spong's statement of being willing to defend anyone charged with anything, except Dési Bouterse; there are certainly worse military dictators on the planet.

Some cultures still eat monkeys and it's not really a taboo.

We owe dogs a great debt for helping humanity for many thousands of years.

So did all the other animals.

I have never personally been helped by any dog.

Collective responsibility is such a strange philosophy. I owe an entity because a member of it's helped a member of my species in the past?

What does this even mean... care to elaborate?

I think dog meat anger is mostly the result of Yulin Dog Meat Festival in China. [1]

It's completely unregulated and the animals (dogs, cats etc) would often be tortured and killed by amateurs because properly killing an animal is harder than it looks.

Dogs are also not eaten for meat or taste and mostly done for superstition.

1 - https://www.animalsasia.org/us/media/news/news-archive/china...

I haven't read that article yet, but from what I know, dog meat is eaten all over China all of the time, just not very much of it. But it is mostly a thing poorer people do, indeed for the superstition that it somehow warms the body or something.

And then the northerners say it is only done in the south and vice versa. And I've personally seen a veterinary student from china get very angry every time someone mentioned Chinese eating dogs...

> "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."

I wonder if they'd feel differently if they thought about how pigs are more intelligent than dogs.

Basically all of society is about conveniently ignoring ethics in illogical ways because it provides immense inconvenience and reward. I'm sure they could convince themselves that giving a pig a heart attack is just as evil as giving one to a dog, but then they wouldn't be able to perform studies which will save millions of lives in the future.

Because, as George Orwell said: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.".

I don't get it that dogs/cats/horses/etc are sentient but pigs/cows/chicken and other animals are not.

It's a social construct like any, a partition or compartmentalization we put up to allow us to behave certain ways. Some cultures have different outlooks, some individuals have different outlooks.

I think the only logic to glean here, is that we're able to get more resources out of a cow, so it was useful for us to compartmentalize and abstract away farming them as different somehow, so we did.

Neither of any of the above. All of these animals are used and killed for research all the time.

The issue for many of them is the personal connection and memories individuals have developed with one species or the other. Then it does matter more if it is a pig or a dog that you are doing harm to. For that matter I have known researchers who are excessively fond of pigs, chicken or cows ...

There are important advantages to pigs over non-human primates.

Originally, research was centered around non-human primates (NHPs). But it didn't work out all. Sure, they're a bit closer to us genetically, but we still reject their tissues, so we would need to genetically engineer them. Humans are also much bigger than the non-human primates we can grow in the lab with ease and that have a fast enough reproductive cycle to make genetic engineering work out. So the organs would all be undersized. Ease of breeding is a big issue too, litter sizes for NPHs are very small compared to pigs.

It gets even worse though. Because NHPs are so close to us, they easily catch infections from us. So they're much more likely to catch diseases from us and to give us their diseases.

There are also ethical concerns with primates being so close to us, which don't exist with pigs given that they're primarily food animals.

It took around a dozen or so genetic changes to knock out markers that allow our immune system to recognize that pig organs are foreign. In particular, primates (including us) are sort of strange in that Alpha-gal, a sugar that's all over all other animal bodies, doesn't exist in us and our immune system violently rejects anything that contains it. Understanding this took a long time, but then we eventually figured out how to prevent pigs from expressing Alpha-gal.

That's basically the story here. Figure out why rejection is happening, knock it out, repeat. There are also many forms of rejection and it happens differently in different tissues. But, we're getting there.

If you want to read more, here's an awesome recent review of the history and state of the field: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.0306...

There is a pretty funny yet horrifying novel about NHPs for xenotransplants. It didn't cover the disease aspect though.

https://farragobooks.com/book/the-organ-grinders/

I heard they are humanized 'pigs'. Ie. engineered so their organs don't trigger our immune system. Not sure how true is this, or it is just a myth.

The Alpha Gal sugar.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/alpha... and https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/retur... are good listens on the subject.

In particular from the second one:

> SOREN: Which brings me back to that little part of the article that piqued my interest in the beginning, because the pig that they got the kidney from to do this was a very special pig. Normally, pigs and other mammals that aren't primates have a sugar in their body that our bodies don't have, and so we don't like it or see it as foreign. And that's why usually an organ from another animal would get rejected. But this pig had been genetically modified. It had had the gene that makes that sugar removed, so it didn't have that sugar. Which is part of the reason this worked. And that sugar just so happens to be called "alpha-gal."

Now I wonder if someone who got meat alergy after a tick bite could eat these pigs. Is this the same alpha gal in both cases?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-gal_allergy

Careful with that. You might end up with pigoons [1]

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

a great series, at least the first two books

I think O&C and The Year of the Flood represent the most likely near-future world, maybe 2035 or so, of any science fiction I can name.

The article states they changed a sugar that triggered rejection.

Exactly:

"More than 95% of human anti-pig antibodies are directed against 3 pig carbohydrates: Gal 1 to 3αGal (≈80%–90%), Neu5Gc (≈5%–15%), and β4Gal (1%–5%)"

"To reduce anti-pig antibody binding to the xenograft, the 3 principal carbohydrate antigen targets have each been successfully removed from pigs by gene knockout (KO) (Figure 3)"

Progress Toward Cardiac Xenotransplantation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7990044/

> Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."

A dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Is this a quote from something? Because I'm certain pigs have personality. I'm even somewhat confident they have as much personality as dogs.

Yes. Pulp Fiction.

I completely agree with you, and left a job in part because they tested on animals.

Well, we'd have to be talkin' 'bout one charmin' motherfuckin' pig.

Harder to digest in the climate of how we treat them, but pigs have personalities too.

Humans and pigs famously share approximately 98% DNA, so we are very similar. Aside from weight and size.

Non-scientific:

- https://thednatests.com/how-much-dna-do-humans-share-with-ot...

Scientific:

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25689318/

- https://aces.illinois.edu/news/human-pig-genome-comparison-c...

the short answer: because we can legally grow them for parts, unlike humans at the moment

My grandfather had a pig's heart valve in his chest, worked great.

Weird to have a a scientist behaving so irrationally regarding pigs vs dogs, especially because the pig was chosen for its likeness to a human.

People have co-evolved with dogs as companions for a long time. And many people have fond memories of dogs and experience with them as part of a family. This is not generally true of pigs even if their hearts are closer to ours. Even as someone who doesn't like dogs, I find the idea of harming one (even with a good reason) worse than harming a pig.

Pigs are more intelligent and equally social. Humane society says they're as smart as 3 year old children. [1] Apparently tests show they've got about the same problem solving skills as chimps.

[1] https://www.humanesociety.org/animals/pigs

I was about to say, aren't pigs smarter than dogs generally? Seems like a strange line to draw.

Obviously it's very culture specific, but pigs are quite far from 'man's best friend'.

Why does intelligence get to be the barometer for this? To me, pigs are essentially big rodents that also happen to be quite delicious. When I eat pork I don’t care how the pig’s intellectual potential will never be realized. I get a side of eggs and go on with my day.

As many aspects in our society, appearance matters the most.

Canine (dog) hearts are also very similar to human hearts. Historically, they were the predominant large animal model for cardiovascular diseases and many landmark studies used them. For some disease models a canine heart resembles an "old human heart" better than a pig heart.

The public sentiment is much more favorable for using pig hearts opposed to dog hearts. It's not nice having to explain that you kill dogs for your research.

https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/

I've kicked a lot more people than dogs, so it probably has more to do with dogness.

Think that's the same reason they were used in nuclear testing, at least in the USSR.

What ... happens to the pigs who get accidental heart attacks? Are they ...? Do they ...?

They get rushed to a special hospital for pigs and then go to live long happy lives with other porcine MI survivors on a farm far, far away.

oh, the heart attacks weren't accidental. They imaged the pig real time while inducing a heart attack to see how the muscle deformed. I never did ask what they did with the dead pigs, but they did have special carts to wheel them around the hospital. People didn't like seeing sedated pigs in the hospital so they had a cart with high sides and they'd throw a sheet over it.

They get a "That'll do, pig" and a pat on the head.

They end up on my dinner plate as a delicious high-protein meal.

Yes

They're not accidental.

They stick a metal rod, that's been frozen in liquid nitrogen, into the piggy's heart.

This kills the heart cells.

Then they stuff the piggy into an MRI machine and take a picture of its heart -- because an alive piggy's heart beats and makes the picture blurry.

Then the scientists get a pretty picture on their computers and high-five one another.

Success, they all think: "mission accomplished. Funding secured."

What does PI stand for here?

Principal Investigator, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator

Humans are pig ape hybrids.

pigs are also used for vaccine testing. Maybe because their immune system is similar to humans. I wonder if man-bear-pig could happen if pigs would develop bigger more folded brains.

Reminder: We've been replacing human heart VALVES with pig valves for a long time now. My grandmother lived for almost a decade after her replacement.

https://www.heart-valve-surgery.com/learning/pig-valve-repla...

I could be wrong but I believe those valves are harvested for their cartilagenous (non-alive) components, their cells stripped, the valves throughly cleaned, and implanted in place. This is not quite the same as implanting an organ with live cells autonomously producing potential antigens on a daily basis

Correct. I'm aiming my comment more at the people asking about the moral ramifications ...

Would artificial valves then not work as well or even better?

My father got a brand new cow valve a few months ago. He had to choose between that, a pig one and a mechanical one, each one is better for each specific case from what I understand. But yeah, crazy stuff.

I imagine Muslims, Jews, and Hindus would tend to have specific preferences as well.

You can live indefinitely with animal valves though they may need to be replaced every 15 years or so. It’a a fairly straightforward minimally invasive procedure though.

Wait, what?

Are you saying that replacing a valve in your heart is "a fairly straightforward minimally invasive procedure"?

According to another article, that was also true of this patient.

May I ask how much did it cost and did insurance cover it?

A surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) for example will cost ~50K I believe? It will be covered by insurance if it is necessary.

There are also less invasive forms of valve replacement (transcatheter / percutaneous) which involve collapsing a synthetic valve around a balloon at the end of a catheter, inserting the assembly into a femoral artery, guiding the valve into the heart and into the open damaged valve, and then inflating the balloon and deploying the new valve inside of the damaged old valve. In SAVR the old valve is removed and the new one is sewn in. In transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), the old valve is held open by the new valve.

My grandmother was Canadian, as am I ... so nary a clue about the cost.

Not OP, but my dad was offered either a mechanical or pig valve when he had a bypass surgery done. Both were covered by insurance, I don't know which cost more, but he hit his deductible either way.

The pig was modified to remove presentation of immunogenic sugars on the cell surface. Unfortunately, the recipient needs to be on immunosuppressants the rest of their life.

This rekindles discussions back in school about chimeras... in order for the organs to be immunocompatible, the donor needs to be partially human. What % is too human to harvest for organs?

I suppose it's still too soon to answer such questions, but apparently, 0% acceptable.

> What % is too human to harvest for organs

I don't think it's really measurable, because a meaningful "%" implies a relatively context-free, relatively uniformly distributed importance to genetic sequence.

The most immunogenic sugar is glycolylneuraminic acid. Humans are incapable of making this sugar so it's immediately recognizable as alien by the human immune system.

You could in theory disable production of this sugar with a single base pair mutation which (if that's how you did it) would make this .000001% sequence difference extremely important over almost any other sequence point.

As a side note it's a matter of speculation that the lack of this sugar is an evasion mechanism for species-jumping flu.

Edit: tick thing was wrong, I had misremembered! Thank you smart reader who has since deleted their comment calling me out.

I don't think it is all that uncommon for regular human-to-human transplant recipients to be on immunosuppressants for life. If I'm not mistaken, that's the case for all organ recipients, but there may be exceptions. I think the concept of "immunocompatibility" can refer to a spectrum of outcomes that we haven't gotten down even for transplants within our own species.

Yes all transplant patients receive immunosuppressants. The only transplant that wouldn't would be an allogenic stem cell transplants (uses the persons own stem cells), however these people typically don't have an immune system to begin with.

They’re not making the pig more human, they’re removing the markers of ‘foreign’ that would make it an immune target. So it’s a nice vanilla organ that minimally attracts the attention of the immune system.

According to another article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2022/01/10/human-...

> Three genes were turned off that might otherwise have triggered an immediate immune rejection – the recognition of a pig organ as coming from a different species. Six human genes were added to prevent blood from coagulating in the heart, improve molecular compatibility and reduce the risk of rejection.

> One final gene was turned off to keep the pig from growing too large.

So they actually did make the pig a tiny bit human.

Just removing some sugars can't possibly work, since the pig heart will lack correct MHC class I molecules, which will make it a target. So the patient will need permanent immune-suppression.

On the other hand (and I am being flippant... Slightly) how do you know that removing this one gene doesn't unlock consciousness?

Speaking of chimeras, there is a Greg Egan short story from his book "Axiomatic" about a human leopard chimera which is bred by an eccentric billionaire specifically to pose for a painting. The actual story is even crazier.

I think the nervous system is really the only part that I'd have ethical concerns about.

If they can grow a pig with a 99% human heart, I don't see why that should be more ethically concerning that harvesting a 100% pig heart.

The concern, I think, that it's obviously unethical to grow a 100% human child and then harvest its heart, right? You're talking about a living, feeling, thinking person! Causing them to suffer or to die is morally wrong, conversely, their life and their right to life have precious, incalculable, sacred value. The thought of harvesting, murdering a human being for one of their organs is repulsive, harvesting them for food is cannibalism and a taboo of the highest order.

And yet many humans eat bacon for breakfast without a second thought. On the operating table, the human heart and pig heart would probably be indistinguishable to a layperson, so why is the one sacred and the other free for the taking?

What part do you think opens that door?

Human organ recipients also need immunosuppressants forever, outside of rare cases. This particular case sounds like a very small modification to the source pig, not a pig carrying a human organ.

I mean I imagine there's research trying to do exactly that: you can identify beating heart cells very early on in embryos, and chimeric organisms are a thing. I imagine someone somewhere is trying to swap out those early cells with human heart cells to see if you can literally grow a pig with a human heart.

I think people will only accept 3d printed organs, pig and animal things are too controversial for some people.

I was listening to a podcast on the CBC about AI and consciousness, and the idea that humans are distinct from an animal (beastmachine, great name for a butcher shop btw) comes from Descartes, who we revere in philosophy (for fair reasons)..

I think we can't blame people for wanting to separate themselves from animals.

When I was a teenager there was a novel adapted for TV by the BBC called “Pig Heart Boy”. It explored the emotional impact of this type of procedure on a teenager and the response from the public, both good and bad. I don’t remember much about it but it looks like it won a BAFTA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Heart_Boy

"Pig Heart Boy (1999)" https://youtu.be/JoBW_XCWDDA

So it’s a real thing then! And I just thought “what would people say if they know the guy has a pig heart?” “A pig heart guy” rings truly bad

The novel was also on the reading list for English at many secondary schools in the mid 2000s.

Yeah when I read the title of this article my first thought was 'isnt that a thing, why is it news'. Then I realised that its not very common and I was just thinking of the book/TV show!

If pigs (or any animal) broaden the compatibility to other organs, what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any?

On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?

On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing organs somehow humanizes the pigs by emphasizing our similarity? I'm not entirely sure from where my hesitation stems.

I'm curious if anyone else read this story with mixed reactions.

> On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?

Yes, in that it's morally superior to eating meat. Eating meat is mostly a nutritional luxury, but needing functioning organs is not. I'm a meat eater, but I imagine there are a number of vegetarians who would be okay with this sort of organ harvesting process.

Of course, if we end up able to grow organs in a lab environment instead of inside an animal, that's probably better for all involved.

A (somewhat?) vegan perspective.

I've teetered on staying committed to veganism for ethical reasons, and have spent time on and off with vegan diets. I don't at all think (nor do I think most vegans think [see disclaimer]) that pigs are worthy of equal moral consideration as humans. I, along with most humans, think that pigs as well as other animals are worthy of some level of moral consideration. Most would be rightfully outraged at the torture of animals for fun, for instance.

Vegans take it a small step further, the moral consideration of a pig outweighs the pleasure provided to our taste buds by consuming their flesh. The prior two examples of consumption and torture, while vastly different, are also on a whole different level than raising pigs to save human lives. If you agree that pigs and humans are NOT morally equivalent (which is most people, including most vegans [see disclaimer],) then I think you are committed to the idea that it is imperative to raise and kill pigs to save human lives.

[Disclaimer: neither vegans or non-vegans are monoliths. There are countless ethical, religious, and practical frameworks one will employ to arrive at any particular ethical position.]

Eat all the bacon you want, get heart disease, get new heart, eat more bacon.

Classic platform lock-in strategy.

A documentary called South Park showed just that in this episode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Bar_(South_Park)

Same pig supplies the heart AND the bacon.

It's pigs all the way down

> what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any?

We slaughter more than 100m pigs per year in the US for food. I don’t think a few more million are going to cause a moral dilemma.

It's vivisection, but hopefully less painfully/traumatically than some slaughterhouses.

What about growing human organs in pigs? Like the pigoons from Oryx and Crake.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1177

Then you have the reverse problem of the pigs rejecting the human organs, I suppose.

Killing a pig to save a life of someone dying is very different than killing a pig so someone can have pork chops for dinner.

Don’t you know? Humans are pigs. /s

Interesting and wild hypothesis. http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html

In the book Treason, people are bred for spare parts.

A Planet Called Treason, right?

Yow. Surprised to see it mentioned here, or, well, anywhere.

"I'm curious if anyone else read this story with mixed reactions."

Definitely.

There are the whole experimentation and vivisection angles that makes it potentially more abusive and agonising than slaughter, especially under the usual commercial incentives, weak jurisdictions etc. The headlines will inevitably come.

If they were raised for organs rather than meat for consumption, we'd likely treat them better. Not only because of the emotional causes, but because they'd probably be worth a lot of money so the investment would be greater to keeping them alive.

This is a big deal. Decades of hard, difficult work has gone into this milestone and it will no doubt prove to be a watershed moment in medicine.

The biggest surprise for me is that organ transplant from animals had been attempted in the past, I was sure it had not been done yet.

Apparently there was a newborn that lived for 21 days with baboon heart in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Fae

Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenotransplantation ) also lists one successful kidney transplant from chimpanzee in 1964:

> Out of 13 such transplants performed by Keith Reemtsma, one kidney recipient lived for 9 months, returning to work as a schoolteacher. At autopsy, the chimpanzee kidneys appeared normal and showed no signs of acute or chronic rejection.

Yeah, but those early attempts were not performed with genetically engineered donor animals. Doomed to failure from the start.

I have worked/imterned on a pig farm once.

The pigs realize more than you'd think, their moms know when you're about to castrate the babies and they remember it, too.

When the slaughterhouse van comes along, they can feel something is wrong, this is, before the van is even visible. They might remember other pigs not coming back from the ride or something, but to kill another animal to save the human animal is not very nice.

Would you refuse a pig heart if it meant the pig would live but you would die? Would you want your loved ones to do so?

> not very nice

I have started to specifically think of myself as "not nice". It's a more accurate way to describe myself.

I am not nice, nor do I strive to be. Life is hard and so am I.

I get it if it's a vegan argument or something, but come on, we harvest pigs on an industrial scale. We can use their organs however we want because we are the apex predator, that's just life.

Genuine question: why is an artificial heart such a hard thing to make? At least from a lay-person's perspective, it's just some pumps and valves, which we've gotten pretty good at making.

Obviously I'm wrong about that because there really isn't a permanent artificial heart yet, but it's something I have wondered for awhile.

It has been done, as mentioned by other comments. My recollection is that aside from power & control, the hardest problem is clotting. The natural heart apparently causes the blood to flow in a way that there is no pooling or stagnation, whereas almost any fixed-shape chamber apparently has locations where the fluid will stagnate, and with blood, that will cause clots in a very short time. When those clots get loose, they can then go to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism, or to the brain and cause a stroke, both of which are very bad and often fatal. So, getting a mechanism that won't do that even once in years of continuous operation is ... nontrivial.

EDIT - this is what I recall reading, but I'm not a biomed, I'd like to see a more detailed description from someone in the field.

There are artificial hearts, and people survived for years on them. The record is 7 years, I think.

They aren't cheap, $100K to $300K for the first year, depending on the device. Then it's around $18K/year to maintain.

I don't know why they are that expensive.

See "total artificial heart": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_heart

Layperson speculation: hard to power 24/7 without an external power source, it must connect seamlessly to the blood stream (can't have it disconnect from the aorta after five weeks), and the surfaces exposed to the blood must not cause blood clots (so careful at the seams).

In addition to soft flexible machinery being somewhat difficult to manufacture, you would also have to hook it up to the brain. Not exactly an easy feat.

Dr. Dhani Ram Baruah was a pioneer of pig heart transplants and tried this in 1997, and his patient lived for 7 days. However this was not received well and Dr Baruah was later arrested.

Interesting that it's a pig heart!

I was introduced into "pig bladder ground up into magical pixie dust" aka ACell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACell) when it was used to treat my child's heart surgery incision. I was super surprised how well it worked and how quick, too!

I read about the "magical pixie dust" in a very old Time Magazine (that my dad had a subscription to). Since then, I have always dreamed of having the tip of my left thumb "regrown" using that or a similar technology. Glad to know that it is being used more commonly on nowadays.

The pig life expectancy is about 12-18 years. Does it mean that the heart will work about so long?

Not necessarily. Life expectancy is affected by the most mortal part of your species: it might be that pigs’ hearts are fine, but they’re prone to cancers after a certain age.

As a kidney dialysis patient who is 6 year in the waiting list, I know the wait times have been slowly creeping up. Any bridging solution to reduce need for dialysis or even better forms of dialysis would be welcome. Despite the anti rejection medication people tell me they feel way better when they get a functional kidney.

Only if the heart is the first thing that goes on a pig.

A few weeks ago surgeons transplanted a pig kidney: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/us-pig-kidney-tra...

Firstly, I will resist the urge to quip about the culinary potential of the remainder of the pig or the moral implications of using animals for their organs (especially since we've already decided, at a societal level, that eating them is acceptable).

Secondly, this begs the question, "how many other high-risk, high-potential treatments deserve resources and experimentation?" Clearly, if this is successful, the potential for adding quality-adjusted-life-years to humans is enormous. Does this inform how we view other experimental treatment? Does this inform how cryonics is perceived more broadly (at its core, another experimental tool to extend life)?

Thank you to all the sentient animals who have given their life.

Pigs caring, saving and dying to support human lives and well being on so many levels. We should definitely worship them much more.

Not meaning to be dissregarding, but literally everything works like that. We use almost everything (even at the expensw of comoletely consuming it (resources) or killing it (plants/animals)) to live ourselves. And it's pretty much the way of life even without humans. Now, all these don't mean we shouldn't be appreciative, and we definitely arent enough. But we should worship? I don't think so

Piglet is Public Domain for a WEEK and they're already harvesting his organs.

This reminds me of the 1997 book Pig Heart Boy by Malorie Blackman. (Wikipedia says there's also a 1999 BBC television adaption, available on YouTube.)

This is great news.

The organ donor wait list is 6-8 years for most organs (kidneys, livers, etc.).

Please be an organ donor.

Being an organ donor needs to be opt-out rather than opt-in.

If it absolutely must be opt-in, then opting in should be easy. In Oregon, it's just a matter of checking a box when you get a state ID or driver's license.

Also, make sure your family knows your wishes.

Yup, I'm a kidney dialysis patient waiting 6 years on the list. In theory I'm approaching the front of the list but they still need to make sure I get good compatibility so who knows. I've know people who have waited for 8-10 years!

Recipients do not do so well in covid times, do they?

I'm surprised no one here is talking about Michael Levin's morphogenesis research. It's absolutely fascinating and might someday obviate the need for transplants and prosthesis altogether. Here's one of his lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41b254BcMJM

Excellent video! Thank you for sharing the link.

Bioelectrics could explain why some cells (like Pancreas beta cells) will not grow in vitro. Recent work has produced gels that enable growing these cells. I expect that the gels provide the electrical fields that the cells expect.

These pigs are genetically modified to remove a particular protein called Alphagal from all their cells - Reminds of of this interesting podcast in Raidiolab. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/retur...

I wonder why a pig heart rather than one from another primate? The article mentions a baboon heart in an earlier attempt at xenotransplantation with an infant. Is a pig’s heart as, or more, compatible or is it more a matter of availability?

At age 2, I was a candidate for a monkey heart transplant, as I had a perforated aortic valve and surgery on tissue with the consistency of wet-toilet paper in an infant had a very high mortality rate (the girl on the table before I went in had died). My parents declined the monkey transplant. Good thing. The intended recipients of multiple attempts at the monkey hearts, died. I eventually received a primitive mechanical implant, which I quickly outgrew. By the 80s I had another surgery to replace it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rk%E2%80%93Shiley_valv...). This had it's own dangers, as the strut would fail along 2 ends of a sizing graph (most people were at the larger size end). I sat safely on the bell curve. I kept that into my 30s which caused various problems with the aortic stem and thickening of the left ventricle.

Now I'm rocking the On-X, which is superior in innumerable ways.

People love primates, specially big ones, and will get angry if in the future thousands of primates are used for organ harvest.

Pigs? People will make jokes like "If I pay for the heart transplant, do I get a free bacon?"

(Also, pigs have the correct size to get an organ usable in humans.)

Pigs are very anatomically similar to humans but due to being a food source there were probably also fewer ethical concerns compared to using primates.

Because they're suitable enough (size, pump performance, etc) and also mass produce-able. The rest is for the same reason we don't eat Monkey bacon via mass farming of monkeys.

IANAD, but from what I remember back when trans-species heart transplant research started in the 80's, it was that pig heart tissue is most similar to human heart tissue.

Hopefully there is a D on HN who can explain better.

It would probably have to be a gorilla, chimp, or orangutan to be big enough to work in an adult human, and those are all endangered species.

From what I’ve read, the additional biological advantages are small but the additional ethical issues are large.

If a pigs heart was beating in my chest I dont think I would ever be able to relax again

I'm only able to relax when I don't think about my need for a constantly beating heart -- pig or otherwise.

Considering how much eaten slop and adipose tissue it's evolved responsible for dealing with, I'd actually be pretty hopeful.

To be fair, pigs generally seem much more relaxed animals than humans. Will happily eat pork too for that matter. I'd just find some nice mud to roll in.

Rest assured that if you were ever in a potential cannibalism scenario, at least a part of you (if prepared appropriately) might taste like bacon.

I might not be able to eat bacon again.

At least you would continue to exist!

It beats dying. (pun intended)

I suspect this guy has already come to terms with death.

I wonder why an artificial heart wasn't an option here.

Other places that are reporting on him say "He was deemed ineligible for an artificial heart pump due to uncontrollable arrhythmia."

"The patient, David Bennett, 57, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told The Associated Press."

It seems like those are not quite there yet: How to Build an Artificial Heart https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/how-to-build-a...

I wonder if it's possible that a pig heart might actually be better than an artificial one? I don't know enough about the state of the art in either to even guess myself.

In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels, there is a race of humanoid pigs called "hyperpigs", distant descendants of pigs that had been genetically-enhanced with human DNA to make their organs more compatible with humans for transplant.

https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Hyperpigs

We're getting good at building artificial nonorganic heart, still a bit away from growing conventional hearts.

I wonder how these future options intersect, whether one will win out over another, or we will be having hybrids?

Electromagnetic motors work fine, but a big issue with them is the method of powering them and maybe biocompatibility issue.

Normal organic hearts don't have this disadvantage but their downside is that they are in its infancy?

An organic heart can self-repair itself, unlike the mechanical one. It's also "proven" to potentially last 100 years with no maintenance required.

An example of this is the Carmet artificial heart from France. It has mechanical bits but also is made of organic tissue that is incorporated into the mechanical device.

One word: 3D printing. Ok that was two words, but still exciting.

On lighter note, patient reportedly asked "Well, will I oink?"

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/health/heart-transplant-p...

Is this really "a medical first" as the article states? I would have sworn that I heard about pig hearts being transplanted into humans at least a decade ago... Anyone from the medical field can give some background? Or am I imagining things? :-)

From another article: “ In September, Montgomery moved the work forward by becoming the first to transplant a pig kidney into a person, but in that case, and a subsequent surgery in December, the person had been declared brain dead. Montgomery kept the body functioning via machine for more than two days each time, showing that the human immune system would not immediately reject a kidney from a gene-edited pig.”

Wow, that's intense! Does anyone know if pig's blood typing matches ours and if not how do they overcome that? Would be curious to see what kind of lifetime they get from this transplant. Amazing.

Not on topic comment, reminded me this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog

“The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection.”

So, we need to genetically engineer the animals

We just need to grow the organs in the lab.

Pigs are extremely close to humans genetically and physiologically, i mean look at those guys: omnivores, no fur (also in some wild races), smart af, this is often overlooked.

If it gets you one degree closer to Kevin it's worth it.

(Kevin Bacon?)

I wonder, in the best case, how long a pig heart is expected to last, given pigs have shorter lifespans than humans. Wish the patient good luck.

Death by swine fever is a totally new scenery in the human race. Now some hog viruses could have an small opportunity to jump to us.

One step closer to Porkin' Across America irl

Possibly the most underrated web series of all time

“Griffith had transplanted pig hearts into about 50 baboons over five years, before offering the option to Bennett.”

I wonder how the baboons did.

I imagine at least the later ones did well enough to give Griffith some confidence in his methods.

Not meaning to diminish the accomplishment, but does it mean that the patient is now forever in debt to the hospital?

Does this create any potential for disease/virus vectors across species if not handled properly?

Yes, they mention one in the article.

A sad sign of what things have come to when a man's last hope at survival is a pig heart.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what's so sad about this situation versus the past? In the past, he would have just died, but "what things have come to" is that medical technology has advanced to the point where he has a shot of making it another few years.

for some reason, i think of the gods that are half human, half animals. They lived forever!! If you can transplant a heart, then new kidneys and pancreas ... we will become sphynxes. Cant wait to see where this will take us in 20 years

Can I live forever by transplanting various pig organs to my failing organs?

Yes, and I want to join you.

Pig of Theseus

So..."human pig hybrid".

How full is the tip jar for things Alex Jones was right about. If you grant him some room for hyperbole and exaggeration guy is a pretty good futurist. He brags about reading research papers all day long. Fascinating role as a court jester and modern day prophet.

This research has always been out in the open. My mom is one of the people who dedicated her life to it - it would be nice if it wasn't just used to scare people.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2866107/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7990044/

Actually, the idea that humans may be primate-pig hybrids is one of the more believable explanations for our extremely unusual skin which is more similar to aquatic mammals than primates.

Thank you for the nightmares

he always had the option for an artificial heart no? but still I applaud this kind of heroic and far too rare utilitarian progress

Does it taste like bacon?

I wonder if it is kosher.

Was it a cop?

Boo

Finally! I wonder how much would it cost me to have car ears transplanted!

Makes me think we might have been able to use Jeffrey Epstein's heart after all

Will make Jews and Muslims question their faith if this becomes a mainstream thing.

Personally I think this is a amazing scientific achievement and will be following the story closely.

Question in what way?

There are plenty of people opting to die every year by refusing blood transfusions and transplants already.

The prohibition is against eating pig, not benefiting from it

The poor guy, not only is he on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his days, but he's a new type of walking transgenic disease vector.

Beats dying in vain wait for a donor.

Lucky guy isn't dead!

Transplant recipients are on immunosuppressants forever anyway, so this is as inconvenient as receiving a human heart. And hey, it beats being dead!

> “If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university’s animal-to-human transplant program.

Which means we now think we have the right to kill as many pigs we want not only the eat them but to extract their organs to make humans live.

Is this really that different from just killing a random healthy human being to save other humans who need a transplant? We somehow think we are superior than any other animal in earth and have the right to do whatever.

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