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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."
My grandma is at that stage of her life where she should have normally been dead. Not to sound coarse, as I love her, but she is being kept alive by drugs which reduce her life to confusion and pain, and I suspect against her will. A lot of medical science these days seems to have forgotten that quality of life matters as much as life itself.
the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.
Why? We've been living with and eating these creatures for millenia. (We've probably been having sex with them for the same time, sick as the concept may be.) Many farmers have probably got pigs blood in open wounds - they tend not to be squeamish when killing animals. If there's a disease that pigs carry that humans haven't already developed at least partial immunity to, then it is extraordinarily hard to catch.
They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.
Um, why? Why do we think that those will be the primary means of transmission? If a new disease does come out of the woodwork, it seems that any mode of transmission may be used.