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Pig-to-Human Transplants On Their Way
cscx writes: "From the folks who brought you Dolly the cloned sheep, come genetically modified cloned pigs which they claim may eventually be able to donate their organs to humans for transplant usage. Who knows, we may make that mark on your driver's license obsolete after all."
No, definately not. The whole point is that the products of a non-kosher animal must not enter your body. This obviously includes eating, but also applies to transplants.
Here is what the CIA has to say on the subject.
Demo Trends CIA report
I watch all of this carefully. For many years, they made insulin for humans from pigs (and then later cows). About 20 years ago, they started producing real human insulin. The pig/cow insulins were fairly close to human, and worked well enough to keep people alive.
In recent years, they've been able to transplant islet cells from human pancreases into type 1 diabetics, essentially making them non-diabetic. However, each procedure requires two prancreases, so that drives the cost and effort up. If they could use pig pancreases instead, it'd probably be quite easy and even affordable (once you consider the cost of insulin and all the other supplies) to perform this procedure more.
Of course, the major obstacle they still face is rejection. Beyond the normal sort of organ rejection problem is the fact that type 1 diabetics' bodies were the ones that killed off the insulin producing cells in the first place. A lot of the anti-rejection drugs have their own nasty side-effects, and I'm not sure a life of those is any better than a life of injecting insulin.
When we look at tissue grafting and associated histocompatibility issues, we usually think of proteins. That is, after all, how the histocompatibility genes were discovered first in mice then humans, and the modern field of immunogenetics was founded. However, the article points to sugars and how their absence can so lessen acute xenograft rejection. The role of sugars in cell recognition can be found in the January 1993 issue of Scientific American.
Yes - it would be acceptable. There's a law in judaism that translates roughly to "for the sake of the life" that essentially overrides most other restrictive laws, including those of the sabbath and kosher practices. Contrary to what the "fanatical middle-east religion" poster suggested, life is actually considered valuable.
not true at all. there are definitely rules that override kashrut. this is one of them. if it saves a life, it's all good. not sure about muslim belief, though. u really can't associate the 2: they are quite radically different.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
You are talking about Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus (PERV).
4 /5 /1042
The answer is that we have actually been using pigs for Xenotransplantation for a very long time: my Grandfather had a pig-valve in his heart, and Jim Finn has fetal pig brain cells in his brain, along with 12 other people, which has (effectively) halted his parkinsons disease, and reversed most of the symptoms (he can work on his car himself now, when before he was reduced from crawling from room to room on his elbows).
Both of these surgeries are vintage 1980's/1990's, and many heart-vavle operations predate that time period, since we did not have mechanical replacements designed until more recently.
The Russians have also been using pig liver cells to treat incurable, and otherwise fatal hepatitus and liver cancer cases, successfully.
In all cases, the protocols require that the person remain sexually inactive in order to avoid the risk of transmitting PERV human-to-human.
However, all testing for the past two decades has indicated that PERV is not transmissable to humans from transplanted tissue: out of the many hundreds of porcine xenotransplant recipients, not a single one tests positive for PERV anywhere but the transplanted porcine cells themselves.
If you are up for a lot of reading, Jim Finn's story (in short form) with a lot of links is available at:
http://tv.carlton.com/organfarm/jim.jhtml
See also Jim's own online journal:
http://www.geocities.com/jimcfinn/index.html
Here is the medical writeup of Jim and the 12 other patients in the journal "Neurology":
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/5
-- Terry