Hacker News Reader

Comment by chana_masala | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I can add some nuance as a vegan (I'm vegan btw, and I use Arch btw). I think that it's amazing that this is possible, but where it seems unethical to me is that there still are many other ways we could route heart transplants from willing humans. I think the only way I'd find this ethical is if the pig died from natural causes. But that probably complicates using the heart. If a pig is killed for food and then the heart is used for this, it still wouldn't be ethical to me, because it's plainly not ethical to kill another being for one's benefit in a situation that is not purely for survival (everyone's favorite deserted island). A heart transplant is a situation of survival, but again - we should continue to explore human donors first.

View on HN

> The patient, David Bennett, a 57-year-old Maryland handyman, 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.

> There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead.

> Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the surgery, said the patient’s condition — heart failure and an irregular heartbeat — made him ineligible for a human heart transplant or a heart pump.

- https://apnews.com/article/pig-heart-transplant-6651614cb9d7...

I'm curious how you'd extract a human heart from a willing human donor without killing the donor. I'm also curious how you'd similarly prepare the human donor in any way to meaningfully reduce the chances of rejection, like genetic modification.

Organ donors

The last time I checked, we were already recruiting organ donors at the DMV. How do you suppose we go about increasing the (currently small) number without resorting to unethical means?

Am I reading this wrong? Isn't this how you'd do it?

> As of 2018, the most common procedure is to take a functioning heart, with or without both lungs, from a recently deceased organ donor (brain death is the standard) and implant it into the patient. [1]

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

The point is that there's a gigantic gap between supply and demand, and a lot if not most of the supply goes to waste because you can't stockpile hearts. They need to be harvested from a compatible donor and very quickly transplanted. The odds of finding a compatible match are not great.

There simply are not enough compatible donors to meet the demand. With an emphasis on "compatible"

I disagree. This brings us back to tribal times; kill the animal or starve, or in this case, kill the animal or die of a heart attack.

Maybe you could at least address the points I gave instead of plainly ignoring them and repeating the same argument? I already addressed this - we aren't in tribal times. We can even grow organs in the lab. We can also coordinate complex routes to securing organ donations. There are so many available options. And again, if a heart from a pig that died naturally could be found, I'd be all for it. I think it adds a more to control than already a trans species heart, but that'd be my ideal.

There is a shortage of organs. There are not enough. Lab grown is not an option yet.

So there's a shortage of human organs in general (especially heart and lungs), which means we need to get them from somewhere.

Using complex routes to secure organ donations isn't a great option, because the viability of organs decrease as time goes on, so there is an effective limit on how far they can travel. It also doesn't help people who are currently ineligible for organ transplants, because their current scarcity means that only prime candidates can get them (otherwise it would be wasteful).

We could change the organ donation system from opt-in to opt-out, but I get the impression that wouldn't be as ethical from a vegan point of view. That also doesn't help the afformentioned distance problems.

Lab grown organs could be a great solution that would actually be better than animal organs, but they're not a viable option yet.

Basically, if we had good options other than xenotransplantation, I would probably agree that it's unethical to use their organs. However, we don't have better options right now (especially ones that can scale to treat everyone that needs an organ), so in my opinion, xenotransplants are better than nothing.

(Also as a side note, a pig that died from natural causes wouldn't be viable for organ transplantation. The pig needs to be physiologically alive for the organs to be viable, and it needs to be genetically modified to not have animal proteins that the immune system can detect).

As a vegan what is your view on testing drugs on animals and do you refuse to use those medicines?

I was hospitalised for a month and didn't ask any questions, because I couldn't - I was dying. But if I had more capacity I would have requested vegan options. Once I came to I did refused any non vegan hospital food - which meant I only ate plain boiled potatoes.

So I was grateful for the medicines I received then that may have been tested on animals or may have had animal ingredients. But I still advocate and prefer medicines to not be tested on animals and to not contain animal ingredients. I think we have a vast amount of untapped technology that could avoid that.

I don't get what is so difficult for people to digest in discussions like these. Someone says something like "I try to do the best I can to minimize the unethical treatment of others," and it's a tidal wave of angry finger pointing and fallacious appeals to nature.

> "I try to do the best I can to minimize the unethical treatment of others," and it's a tidal wave of angry finger pointing and fallacious appeals to nature.

Maybe because the vegans people have met, are the obnoxious ones that want to push their eating disorder on everyone else, so they just point out the hypocrisy when appropriate.

I've met plenty of reasonable vegans. I wouldn't consider them to have an eating disorder. I eat meat.

When I've engaged with discussion about this with them (usually because I asked), I've found their arguments personal and convincing.

I don’t get what tidal wave of angry finger pointing you are talking about. All I see is curious people discussing the topic in a civilized manner.

Animals eat each other alive in the wild, they kill on a whim for the pettiest of reasons.

Dying at the hands of another animal is as natural a cause as you can get. Because we're human we don't treat animals badly while alive, that where our ethics come in.

Obviously if there enough hearts to go around no one would be looking at pigs.

We generally consider killing something to be treating it badly.

I don't know who 'we' is, but society in general disagrees. People eat meat with a clear conscience.

Both can be true. Everyone considers sweatshop child abuse to be bad, but we still buy things that people know were produced in those conditions. We have a clear conscience because we just don't think about it too much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com