Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant
nature.com
nature.com
It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with.
But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead.
It’s quite something to stop and think about how the problem is becoming less and less about “how do we do the science and the engineering?” And more about “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?”
They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.
> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek
No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.
And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow.
> What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint.
The writers were surprisingly prescient about this. Turns out, the secret about paper-based workflow isn't that a sheet of paper can display anything, but that you can have a lot of them, freely arrange them in front of you as you need, pass them around, pin up the wall, etc. Multitasking on a single swab is strictly inferior to that.
EDIT:
>> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek
> No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.
We definitely do, and this, somewhat unexpectedly, got us to the point of being close to having a basic universal translator as well.
Computers on Star Trek ships weren't built for conversations, and weren't talked with as a regular thing for basic operations, so it wasn't like chatting with LLMs. There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, translating directly to something you'd consider a "tool call" today. But that's not the actually notable part.
The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers is that they understood natural language and intent. They could handle context and indirect references and all kinds of phrasings. This was the part we didn't know how to solve until few years ago, until LLMs unexpectedly turned out to be the solution. Now, we have this.
(Incidentally, between LLMs and other generative models, we also have all the major building blocks of a holodeck, except for the holographic technology.)
Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste.
> The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers
Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters?
> is that they understood natural language and intent.
Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
A tree falling in a forest with nobody to hear it: if it makes a "sound", you think "sound" is the vibration of air; if it does not, you think "sound" is the qualia.
"Understanding" likewise.
> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology.
1. "Execute self-diagnosis script" doesn't require self-reflection or anything else like that, just following a command. I'd be surprised if any of the big AI labs have failed to create some kind of internal LLM-model-diagnosis script, and I'd be surprised if zero of the staff in each of them has considered making the API to that script reachable from a development version of the model under training. No reason for normal people like thou and I to have access to such scripts.
2. Not that the absence says much. If humans could self-diagnose our minds reliably, we wouldn't need therapists. This is basically "computer, send yourself to the therapist and tell me what the therapist said about you".
> When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
Those computers (and the ships themselves) went wrong on such a regular basis on the shows, that IRL they'd be the butts of more jokes than the Russian navy.
To use like we'd use paper.
> Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean
That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do.
> and don’t know what the right answer is.
They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 - the model itself is behaving much like a person's inner monologue, or like a person who just speaks their thoughts out loud, without filtering. It's very much not a database lookup.
> I also disagree that was an underappreciated featured of the Star Trek computers, it’s one of their defining features.
What I meant is, people remember and refer to Star Trek's ship computer for its ability to control music, lights or shoot weapons, etc. with voice commands. People noticed the generality, the shamelessness of interaction, lack of structured command language - but rarely I saw anyone paying deeper attention to the latter, enough to realize the subtle magic that made it work on the show. It wasn't just some fuzzy matching allowing for synonyms and filler words, but more human-like understanding of the language.
(Related observation: if you pay attention to sliding doors on Star Trek vs. reality, you eventually realize that Starfleet doesn't just put a 24th century PIR into the door frame; for it to work like it does on the show, the computer has to track approaching people and predict, in real time, whether or not they want to walk through the door, vs, just passing by, or standing next to them, etc. That's another subtle detail that turns into general AI-level challenge.)
> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even strange pieces of technology.
That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components.
(I do imagine the scans involve a lot of machine learning and sensor fusion, though. That's actually how "life signs" can stop being a bullshit shorthand.)
> The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves.
They'll stop when run with a "who am I?" tool.
> When the Start Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that, they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning. Yet you’re defending this monumental gap as being effectively the same thing. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave.
All I'm saying is, LLMs solved the "understand natural language" problem, which solves the language and intent recognition part of Star Trek voice interfaces (and obviously a host of other aspects of computer's tasks that require dealing with semantics). Obviously, they're a very new development and have tons of issues that need solving, but I'm claiming the qualitative breakthrough already happened.
Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.
> (…)
> Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.
Or, in other words, we don’t have Star Trek’s computer like originally claimed, and our current closest solution isn’t the way to get it.
My computer can both run an LLM (albeit a bad one, only has 16 GB of RAM) and also run other things at the same time.
In fairness, half the time the Trek computer does something weird, it only makes sense if there's no memory/process isolation and it's all one uniform blob of compute. Made sense in the 60s where Spock's chess app losing to him was useful evidence that the CCTV recordings had been faked, not so sensible in 2025 when the ship stops being able to navigate due to the excess system demand from the experimental holodeck.
How we use paper derives not only from our own practical needs, but also from the intrinsic limitations of paper. Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size. The idiosyncratic way that tablets were used in Star Trek isn't how people would actually do things, it merely reflects the limitations of the writers to imagine all of the practical implications of technology such as they were depicting. It would be like somebody in the 1800s speculating about motor vehicles, supposing that teams of a dozen or more motor vehicles might be connected using ropes and used to tow a single carriage, because that's how they did it with horses.
> To use like we'd use horses.
Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with one paper sheet-sized screen is a significant downgrade. Which is why tablets are used primarily for entertainment, not for work.
Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around you is an advantage, not a limitation, of the paper-based workflow.
People vastly prefer digital dictionaries over paper dictionaries because you can more quickly find stuff. And that’s with dictionaries in alphabetical order.
Stacks of paper suck, there’s some potential utility in a space ship for all the redundancy around independent tablets you can hand someone. That’s something that regularly happens on the show and kind of makes sense, but is more a visual reference for the audience. Which is where stacks of tablets shine, the viewer can easily follow what their doing even if you can’t see the screen.
Thus, in practice almost everyone is using multiple screens at work when they can even if printing stuff is trivial.
The price of a lowend Android tablet can be shockingly low, to the point that physical multitasking is totally practical for an environment as expensive as space travel. The issue is bloat. The UI for a Trek level starship could easily run on 1999 era PC hardware much less powerful than a 2025 postage stamp of an SOC, if we were still coding like it was 1999. But not if it has to run Android Infinity with subpixel AI super resolution, a voice interface, and no less than 70MB of various JavaScript frameworks crammed into a locked Chromium frontend.
I run a Motorola mobile device at work (retail) that would be competitive with 10-15 year old flagship phones. The browser interface is designed for tracking and ease of development and to show off new AI tools. It employs landing pages, phased loading, a bunch of dynamic things. Looking up a SKU number takes 2-5 minutes (MINUTES) to load things I could get in ten milliseconds on a console interface or hundreds of milliseconds in a 1999 World Wide Web e-commerce site.
Depends which Star Trek series you are talking about; early TNG routinely had complex request for new research/analysis/hypothesis generation and evaluation; if it came out today we’d accuse Starfleet of being infected with vibe crewing...
>And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World.
Those are more human problems than technological problems.
What difference does it make, anyway? The distinction is meaningless when the result is the same.
It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that new developments in technology have both positive and negative potential, and how they're applied is largely due to sociological factors. When we dissociate the issues with "technology" we allow ourselves to see the underlying issues causing potential misuse, making progress at solving those problems possible instead of a knee-jerk negative lashback against anything new.
It is patently obvious by now that major developments coming out of big companies will be used to further encroach their dominance at the expense of every one else. It is not a knee-jerk reaction to recognise an obvious pattern and identify probable pathways for abuse. On the contrary, those have to be identified and discussed early if there is any hope of counteracting the problems.
So no, it doesn’t make a difference to distinguish between the technological and human problem when we’re not solving the human problem. It is an excuse which could be applied to anything—technology doesn’t harm by itself, all of it is created by humans. That’s just a variant of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. It is important to recognise the role of technology in facilitating and worsening the human problem.
Plus, the captains ask tons of questions a computer would know, but only the bridge crew are trusted with.
“The computer is malfunctioning” has been a plot device in Star Trek since the beginning.
This part I agree with, but is also very easy to fix (use a very old UI system, e.g. direct port of Apple's HyperCard).
On the hardware front, the only thing Trek Padds had that real life can't really do is that Trek's power cells had an energy density on par with "let's say an atomic battery had a way to dial the decay rate up and down at will and were not also a horrifying source of neutron radiation".
Not disagreeing with you at all, but the surveillance on Starfleet vessels and facilities is almost complete and all-encompassing. Real-time location, bodily attributes, eavesdropping, access to all communication and computer data, personal and otherwise, I don't think there's anything that is private in their world! Remember that time The Doctor started a two-way video call with (I think) B'Elanna while she was in the shower? That being said, Starfleet is a paramilitary organisation, perhaps it's less awful in civilian life when one isn't wearing a Comm badge.
I wonder if you and I would consider this degree of invasiveness an acceptable compromise with a life almost completely without illness, any form of capitalism and the opportunity to pursue pretty much any life path we wish, in a society which is largely at peace with itself.
Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0].
The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time.
At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is.
[0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
People seems to forget that Orwell was a anti-Stalinist socialist.
I haven't forgotten that Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist. But there weren't any anti-Stalinist socialist states at the time.
Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot.
Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them work.
My mom worked with eGenesis on pig xenotransplantation, particularly lung.
Here are some links if you'd like to donate to the International Xenotransplantation Association:
https://tts.org/74-ixa/889-ixa-in-memoriam-agnes-marie-azimz...
Thanks to a kid on a motorcycle she got a kidney just in the nick of time.
She was in her early 20s and was told she could expect a few years. Because of that she never had kids.
Her donated kidney served her well and she lived a quite normal life. She passed when it finally gave up when she was close to 70.
So those "few years" turned into almost 50.
Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course.
She always wondered if that was the reason it held out so long.
Typically, after a kidney transplant, patients are instructed to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. This is to reduce the risk of the patient's body rejecting the transplanted organ. Your family member was just straight up lucky that her body didn't reject the organ, even without any immunosuppression.
One thing that's fascinating to me is that most immunosuppressant drugs used today hadn't yet been discovered in the early 60s! AFAIK, all they would have had was prednisone, prednisolone, and azathioprine. Back then, a kidney transplant aided by these drugs would have been as new and revolutionary as the Hepatitis C cure or the triple-drug therapy for cystic fibrosis is today.
That was my thought as well when she told me. Then again, when given just a few years perhaps one considers these things a bit differently. The side effects for the drugs you listed does indeed not sound like a lot of fun.
Glad she had a largely fulfilling life, but also thinking this. As much as it was her choice what to do with her body, it’s probably a good idea to at least tell the healthcare professionals about things like that, even if after the fact.
No, the pipeline to handle this feedback is completely missing from modern medical practices.
There is not really any way for a doctor to make use of this information to advance medical research.
[1]: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/motorcycle-rallies-and-o...
It's one anecdote. In the hierarch of significance this is below even the "one published paper" level which you certainly should also ignore even if you know enough to interpret the paper.
It's really good she lived for 50 years with an kidney transplant. But it is a massive stretch to say that she willed herself to last that long.
...so's the donor! (I'll see myself out...)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/25/surgeons-tra...
And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots" type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from it on the other hand does seem implausible)
[For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became a utopia was first the government put poor people in internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in 2024, which eventually lead to people learning from their mistakes and a utopia society. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots ]
But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without the Bell Riots - Star Trek came this close to accidentally turning prophetic, as in the months prior things really felt like the Riots are going to happen on the date.
--
[0] - In that timeline, at least. We've already past several important world events that originally happened in Trek timeline, so the show keeps shifting the dates to keep with the overall premise of being imagined future of real humanity.
IIRC the writers now settled on "Romulan temporal agents meddling with timeline, desperate to stop the Federation from forming, and failing because apparently the cosmos really wants UFP to be a thing" as a convenient explanation to push WW3, Eugenics Wars, etc. forward every once in a while.
[1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/
Back in the 80s. In the 60s it was just megadeath, with a chance of mutants.
(The Krakatoa movie was in 1968, but the winter thing took a while to sink in)
But you are right that the concept was only made popular in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were classified or unknown and obscure to the public.
My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of flying cars that’s so different from our own is that it was the events of the first movie (going back there and changing history) that ultimately led us to that different path.
It's not bad for society if it was used to make building to provide rentable space to industries and business or to provide homes, or quite often both, but it doesn't provide easy money to investors.
Now sitting on land and seeing it appreciate with no hard work from you? That's easy money.
But a basic level of housing is a human right, because it's a prerequisite for maintaining your humanity, ditto for healthcare.
I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham.
But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current administration generally does a good job and is voted in with strong support.
So agreed, they can do really interesting things because of their time horizons of control combined with willingness to work for the better of the people.
For the gay stuff, like the west?
You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the for people sense) in allocating land and building housing. Ideally dense housing.
Why? Housing should act as a means to live decently. If my house depreciated to 0 once I'd built it, I wouldn't mind at all.
> You need socialism to do this efficiently
No you don't, you need to heavily tax empty and secondary residences and the issue solves itself in capitalism just fine.
Many of us are taught that heavy taxation is socialism, or at least incompatible with capitalism.
But the status quo benefits many parties… alas, “people” problems are harder than technical ones. Most humans can be remarkably greedy, and also stupid in large groups.
At least we seem to have figured out how to, um, steer large populations quickly, now we need to use that to effect positive change.
And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP.
Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical practitioners, and electing members who did all of the above to Congress.
But you actually said every major country is in debt, so do all the major countries owe money to um...minor countries?
Perhaps it is not the country that is in debt at all, but the government? In which case it must owe money to entities like people and corporations. The government has powers to take money from entities in its jurisdiction and pay its debts, it is called taxation. In fact since the money is issued by the government in the first place, you could consider a token of government debt is actually a token meant to pay your taxes with. By lending money to the government you receive interest, or in other words a discount off your future tax.
All very neat, and why a government being in debt is no reason for it to not be able to pay for things.
In fact you might argue that government debt takes money out of the economy, so keeping inflation down. This means the government can spend more without causing inflation. If a government borrows a dollar and spends that dollar, there is the same amount of dollars circulating. However if it borrows it off someone who is hoarding it, and spends it then you create gdp growth. Magic.
Perhaps it's time to get past puritanical hatred of debt?
Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going:
https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...
Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point.
Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2025-PER/pdf/BUDG...
Yup this. I went in for a cardiac stress test a few months ago. Less than 30 minutes in a room with a treadmill, an ekg machine and a low-mid level technician. $10k.
I don't think that's a hard claim to make in other terms than % of gdp—I can't imagine many americans want to devote that much of our gdp to it when other countries manage a high degree of care with much more efficiency. But we seem to have largely talked ourselves out of democratic control of such matters, somehow, for some reason, repeatedly over the last 70 years or so.
It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to consolidate power for themselves after you remove the current set.
Most people are not in it for their fellow man and whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society -- lied to you.
By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it turns out that was just a side quest.
I think there are other avenues here that are probably better spent to make society better.
Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian policies. We know that allowing more and more consolidation ain't the move.
The amount of taxes we collect isn’t the problem. Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go up regardless of what political side you want to point fingers at)
The things you mentioned are always a problem because even the far left in America is incredibly right-wing.
As science and medicine progress, what was once considered solely god-given, or exclusively biologically determined, will be for people to decide for themselves, the decision made between them and their doctors.
biological ones are typically made from either cows, or pigs (bovine, porcine respectively).
but this is on another level altogether.
Back in the 90’s there were a series of values where the flipping plate shattered-sending shrapnel into the heart and beyond. Typical failure mode is stuck open which is survivable. Stuck closed is very bad.
I'll just get my coat...
And what fabric is that coat made of?
Also, the risk of transmitting zoonosis is larger in primates than in other mammals, because with humans being primates as well, more viruses/prions/fungi might be infectious to both.
My search only finds modern claims that he's the true tablet inventor and tablets are touch this and stylus that, but these poison results about any possible original reference of that interaction model having been conceived at the time.
Replacing human heart valves with pig valves has been a thing at least as far back as the 1970s with decade-ish survival rates.
Granted TFA is about a whole organ -- not just a piece of tissue -- but xenotransplantation per se is not new.
Medical advancements in particular are notorious for having a hideously long lead time. This here is an experimental procedure that, if all goes well, will only start becoming commonplace by year 2035. It's not guaranteed to all go well.
You'd think there would be a massive push for new medical technologies that have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and you'd be wrong. Healthcare is where innovation goes to die. Most companies that attempt to develop this kind of bleeding edge treatment crash and burn either before or shortly after seeing the first results. Just the cost of early testing of a new treatment option is enough to bankrupt many.
Progress, invention, is part of being human, so this is natural and normal thing that these thing happen. You can stop, marvel, and then go improve upon your own niche.
If this is Star Trek then I suppose it's a good example of "be careful what you wish for"...
Sci-Fi movies don't tend to be all happy, happy, fun and joy for everyone in them. o_O
So while in my personal vacuum this is awesome, when I stop to consider the situation for 30 seconds I can only think: huh, we might have been able to find a new cure for humanity that isn't going to matter when having "a profession" (like doctor) is no longer relevant to our inevitable hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
I'm not sure how Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the company building these pig kidneys is located, becomes a hunter-gatherer society on account of climate change.
Besides hunter/gatherers need medicine men who understand the old ways.
You can hook up the nerve wires and blood pipes from one body into the heart from another body and it works? Just thinking about the simple physical connections would make me nervous. Why isn’t there blood just leaking out in your body? Why isn’t that other heart sliding out of place while you move around?
Even weirder is that an adult kidney transplanted into a child will actually shrink to fit.
So you get into a stressful situation or get a flee or flight response, and your heart is not affected by it, or at least the heart rate, but your cardiovascular system may be needed because in that case the rest of your body is, and presumably you may need much more blood to be pumped out to your organs among other things.
It is a cool food for thought.
For instance, there's a fun diagram on page 11.
There's also an operator's manual for the "driver" that powers the heart: https://www.vumc.org/cvicu/sites/default/files/2020-03/Opera... Which includes all kinds of (appropriately!) paranoid warnings such as:
> To avoid accidentally switching off the AC power to a docked Driver, do not plug the Driver into any electrical outlet controlled by a wall switch.
Heart surgeons are superheroes.
>> First, the donors were often created on a commercial pig breed whose heart and kidney sizes are too large for human application. Although elimination of growth hormone receptor gene expression could reduce organ sizes, it comes with other undesired biological consequences. Second, the donors were designed for testing in OWMs. They lacked the α-Gal (galactose-α-1,3-galactose) or the α-Gal and Sd(a) (Sia-α2.3-[GalNAc-β1.4]Gal-β1.4-GlcNAc) glycans but expressed the Neu5Gc (N-glycolylneuraminic acid) glycan to match with Neu5Gc expression in OWMs. However, in vitro analysis suggests that a human-compatible porcine donor should ideally have all three glycans eliminated to match with the absence of the three glycans in humans. Although renal grafts derived from the porcine donors lacking these three glycans and carrying various human transgenes have been tested in OWMs, graft survival was short8 or not all human transgenes were expressed. Third, the donors carried porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV) sequences in their genome, which present a zoonotic risk, as PERV transmission to human cells in culture and their integration into the human genome have been demonstrated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwQns6vGfj4&list=PL4NL9i-Fu1...
Not necessarily that 6 months is a short period of time.
"This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person"
The pig organ is the first thing mentioned, with the living person last.
Whereas:
"This is the longest time a patient has survived after a pig organ transplant."
This puts the patient first, and doesn't give as much of that kind of vibe.
Edit: Actually, that updated sentence may need some adjustment. I assume when organ transplants fail we don't just let people die with them. So maybe that's why the original sentence had such emphasis on the survival of the pig organ...
- This is the fastest Alice had driven since Bob broke the speed limit.
- This is the oldest tree still standing in the burnt forest.
- This is the most stable chemical additive to our long-lasting concrete.
Without context, to me these examples sound primarily about Alice going fast, the tree being old, and the chemical being stable. But if those appeared in articles about traffic law, natural disasters, and sidewalk design, then these phrasings might be less ambiguous if flipped (as another commentor pointed out).
It also validates the platform. If it can last for 6 months, chances are there isn’t some catastrophic failure mode that would keep it from lasting for 6 or 60 years.
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/video-eliminat...
https://www.immunofree.com/how-it-works/
If I were a patient, I'd probably want a pig kidney now and really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning is a thing.
There was another technology under development, colloquially called the 'ghost heart' [1]. It uses a dead heart that's similar to a human's, most likely a pig's heart (I speculate that an unused human heart can also be used). They remove all the cells from the heart using a soap-like substance to obtain a ghostly white colored scaffolding of a heart (probably made of collagen). Then they use the recipient's own stem cells to grow heart muscles, blood vessels, etc on the scaffold. The process to get it to work like a human heart seems complicated, but doable. As you can guess, this heart is fully immunocompatible with the patient and doesn't require immunosuppressants like after a regular transplant. I imagine that this can eventually be replicated for any organ and that the improvement in the patient's quality of life it will bring is unthinkable in the current state of affairs. I'm not sure about the progress and current state of this technology, but several articles do turn up on searching.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/01/health/ghost-heart-life-i...
As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context, or not so close to the problem they can’t see it, I would assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for bypasses and aneurism repair operations. Ghost intestines for reconstruction surgery for people with cancer or massive internal trauma. You’d have a simpler organ to reproduce, but in the artery case you’d likely have to also work turnaround time. Heart failure can be slow, but bypass surgery is often scheduled as either urgent or emergency (I just had a convo with a man who wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital after an angiogram showed he was one stairwell away from a fatal heart attack). But not having to harvest material from the thigh before surgery begins should shorten the surgery and reduce complications. You can have as much artery as you want for the surgery. You could have spares.
It’s a big problem, but still seems like they’re swinging for the fences when they could save people in the short term while working on organs.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/spinach-leaf-transfo...
That's a part of the reason why this tech is so promising. If we can already target immune incompatibilities to make "elongated pigs" with organs that fit human bodies somewhat, then what are the limits?
I had a friend that chose to die, after several months on a home dialysis machine.
I've seen this sentiment before but I've been unable to find an explanation why. Searching around it's noted as relatively painless.
Can anyone explain why it's so difficult?
The pain can come from fluid removal and electrolyte imbalances during the dialysis. The fluid removal is important because if you kidney fails, at some point you stop urinating. The in-clinic dialysis process is also compressing the 24 hour a day function of your kidney into a 3-4 hour process typically every other day. So if you remove fluid and shift electrolyte during a short period of time it can cause cramping and pain.
The situation can be improved by doing treatment over more days or for a longer period. That is where home dialysis comes in. Some people run it at a gentler pace at night. Some may run it for 5 hours 5 days while watching TV or doing something else. They get some flexibility around their schedule.
You can see one of the new home hemodialysis systems here. They are streamlined and less complicated to use than in the past. But for some older people and those with mobility issues they might not be operate it on their own.
https://freseniusmedicalcare.com/en-us/products/treating-wit...
I'll note however that I used a different type of dialysis called peritoneal dialysis which uses osmosis action of passing fluids through your peritoneal membrane in your abdomen. No needles involved but it doesn't work for every patient and over time it can stop working. But you end up holding a lot of dialysis fluid at night which can be uncomfortable. But it has less of the complications of fluid removal and electrolyte imbalance issues.
There is actually a project for a implantable artificial kidney but it has slow progress due to funding. This devices operates 24x7 do it could operate at a much gentle pace. Maybe its too ambitious but the lead scientist thinks about $50M would be enough to get it through trials.
They always come back wiped out, and sick.
Usually, it’s a temporary thing; meant to keep you going, until a full cure (like a transplant) can be effected.
My friend made his decision, because a transplant was not an option. He would need to live like that, for the rest of his life. I have a couple of other acquaintances, that got transplants, and were able to go past dialysis.
> Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a “fantastic long-term outcome”, he adds.
I am surprised by this being considered a long-term outcome though. Going through the high risk of a kidney transplant, immunosuppression required, risk of using a pig kidney in general, etc seems like a lot if the hope is for 12 months as a long-term unlikelihood.
In a perfect world, this tech would work first try, and the xenotransplant would last for decades. We don't live in a perfect world.
If this proves a workable stopgap, bridging the wait time for the people waiting for donor organs, extending lives of those who don't qualify for organ donations? It might be worth using on those grounds alone. And it's likely that organ longevity could be improved iteratively.
I.e. use an organ to failure, figure out what went wrong and what the host immune system has reacted to, find a way to gene edit around that, get another 6 months of transplant longevity in the next version. Rinse and repeat.
Yes, we don't know what the true limits are - "universal and permanent organ replacement" is very much on the table with this tech. But it's pretty clear: getting all the way there wouldn't be quick or easy. A year of organ lifetime is a damn good start.
Having a ready supply of pig kidneys would be fantastic. All the sudden it wouldn't matter as much that you are a bad candidate, you might end up simply cycling through pig kidneys more frequently.
https://www.science.org/content/article/longest-human-transp...
Pretty amazing tech tbh
Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe there's more to diabetes than just a new pancreas. Interesting development, in any case. Thanks for sharing.
He'd probably need to go on dialysis if that were to happen. How long he'd survive IDK. I think I've read that people survive around 2 years on dialysis.
> Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe there's more to diabetes than just a new pancreas.
It can be. That was the first developed insulin. I believe it's completely synthetic at this point.
https://www.kgri.keio.ac.jp/en/research-frontiers/papers/202...
There are talks to breed them smaller for better handling, as they need to live inside the regulated facility. Having a human size animal roaming around is physically complicated to deal with.
I thought it was a fucking insane idea and wanted to leave immediately.
Turns out I am a fool.
“Man Suffers Unfortunate Loss From Ex Wife, Shows Up at ER with Horse”
If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)
Xenotransplantation is one of the life lines I'm counting on. I'm hoping that, by the time I need it, the issues that we currently have will be worked out. I have zero ethical issues with breeding and eventually culling pigs in order to save human lives. I hope that there will be other, better, breakthroughs by then, but if not, the best I can hope for is that the pigs are raised in a sterile and enriching environment, and that the only bad day they have is their last day.
I also like chicken liver. It's small enough to be cooked whole.
I'd like to try pig liver.
While I don’t think we should be torturing animals or anything, obviously, I think I am humanist enough to where I think the ethical thing is to prioritize human lives or avoiding severe long-term discomfort (as is the case with dialysis).