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Pig-to-Human Transplants On Their Way

Posted by timothy on from the oink-oink dept.

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."

2 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Re:question for the jewish folks by Moosifer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. PERV by tlambert · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are talking about Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus (PERV).

    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/54 /5 /1042

    -- Terry