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."

Comments

question for the jewish folks

[Afrosheen]

Is this gonna be kosher or not?

Re:question for the jewish folks

[Moosifer]

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.

Re:What effect will this have on the Earth?

[tempny]

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.

Re:organs

[rbgaynor]

Unless, of course, you are the pig...

Re:The *really* scary part hasn't even been mentio

[dvdeug]

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.

PERV

[tlambert]

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