Slashdot Mirror
Pigs with Human Genes
LGRiske writes "In a step toward creating herds of pigs that could provide organs for transplanting into humans, Italian researchers manipulated swine sperm to make an animal strain that carries human genes in the heart, liver and kidneys."
In general the idea is to create tailor made organs for people, you pay $xxxx and get your own half-human pig with spare organs (using your DNA). Since most organ failures can be forseen a while in advance this is a viable option as pig gestation periods are only a few months. IANA Biology expert, but this is what I have understood from other articles, feel free to correct me.
I can't believe this story was reported here, let alone even on MSN.
Essentially, what these guys did was find a way to add a gene into a pig by messing with the sperm. This technique can't be used for removing genes, and can't replace genes. They can only add genes.
So they added DAF, because they say it helps fight rejection. Great. That is still a pig heart/liver/kidneys that you would be getting. There are lots of reasons that you can't transplant organs, including but not limited to:
1) Marker proteins. Your body won't even take organs from other people, let alone pigs. You'd have to replace pig markers with your own, which they cannot do.
2) Other surface proteins. They think they can ADD genes to do stuff to combat the sugars that pigs have on the surfaces of their cells. No removal, just throwing some gene for creating a suppressing chemical into the mix.
3) Cell morphology/DNA. Pig DNA is not human DNA. Pig cells are not human cells. Pig cells expressing "human genes" are closer, but when these cells replicate, when you get a virus, when something goes wrong.. what's gonna fix it? How do we know what will happen? Your body isn't built to have weird cells throw into it - that's why it destroys them. They have a long way to go before they even understand just membrane/cell surface reactions, and yet they wanna throw them into people.
To quote: "Lavitrano said that five to seven other pig genes will need to be silenced or replaced by human genes before useful organs could be harvested from the animals."
So tell me, how is this really news? The headline should have read "Scientists develop new but limited method for gene implantation." It's been done.
Quite an interesting article, despite the usual newscientist hyperbole: "The technique is very easy - you could do it on the farm." Umm yeah whatever.
Actually it is Kosher, while some disagree Judaism lawers seem to be saying that it is because. 1) surgery is different then eating. 2) The Kosher laws can be suspended when necessary to save a life.
We (muslims) can't eat them in normal cases... But if we are deprived of food in a certain situation and we are about to die then we can eat pig.
Surgery shouldn't be a problem.
Hmmm... Pie...
Check this article in New Scientist. The researchers have found a way of increasing the effectiveness by a factor of 25 , and it is so easy that the technique could be done on a farm. Incredible. Smells like a revolution to me.
Bitter and proud of it.
No, you are way off base. They are not trying to make pigs that genetically match individual humans. As a biology PhD, my understanding is that they are trying to engineer pigs whose organs will be less likely to be attacked as "alien" (leading to organ rejection) by human immune systems *in general*. This involves making multiple genetic changes in the pigs' DNA to make their genetic markers more compatible with humans'. This article is about a new method for making the genetic changes that may be quicker and less expensive... the technical details are in PNAS.
It also occurs to me that if one was drowning, yelling "Help! I'm drowning and I lost my bikini top" would probably be m