Iceland’s Quest to Use 100 Percent of Its Fish Waste | Hacker News Reader

Iceland’s Quest to Use 100 Percent of Its Fish Waste

hakaimagazine.com

41 pointssohkamyung7 comments

> But Oddsson’s life was spared by an ingenious invention: grafted cod skin—7,000 square centimeters of it. The procedure adorned Oddsson’s upper body with the permanent, distinct imprint of scales.

This is so metal. But also, very "pirates of the Caribbean." For a member of a fishing community, I can see how this would be a lauded badge of pride. I do wonder how it would play out in the rest of the world, especially if fish skin is cheap and pig skin is not, it seems like this would be avoided like the plague by image-conscious patients.

Not sure if it is cheaper but according to the founder (paraphrasing from a podcast he was on in Iceland)

The pig skin has possible viruses that can infect the human body, so they need to dip it into an acid to kill any potential infection, this destroys the pig skin. With cod living in different temperature, they don't have these viruses so they only need to dip into salt water to "clean" it, the cod skin keeps intact and therefore works better

The human body accepts the cod skin as normal skin since it's basically same at molecular level, because of evolution

Fascinating

> The procedure adorned Oddsson’s upper body with the permanent, distinct imprint of scales.

This is not true

They used this meshed fish-skin graft - https://twitter.com/kerecis/status/1512189474750533638

If he want's to call it fish scales cool. I would.

But the media lying about medical treatments is not cool.

Pétur Oddsson story is here - https://vimeo.com/727665088 (Graphic medical)

And I call into question if the Kerecis meshed fish-skin graft works.

But since we are at the discussion level does it gives you scales imprints or not there is little point. This is a different product to using tilapia skin which has been used on humans and by vets for a while.

Sigh. The way they wrote that is indeed misleading. What a shame.

FYI, on July 7th: "Coloplast has signed an agreement to acquire Kerecis, an innovative, fast-growing company in the biologics wound care segment, for up to USD 1.3 billion (around DKK 8.9 billion), of which USD 1.2 billion (around DKK 8.2 billion) is an upfront cash payment."

https://www.kerecis.com/coloplast-announces-agreement-to-acq...

Just FYI - cod liver is fantastic. I had it recently in Spain at a tapas place. It's like the flavor of sardines in a pate-type texture.

I wonder if those grafts will become popular with the body-mod crowd

Reply on news.ycombinator.com