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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."
This is no medicine issue, these are the voters that will ensure Silvio Berlusconi another term as president.
To avoid rejection, the donated organ has to be *so* similar to the original that it probably has the same flaw. Transplants are like replacing your burnt power supply by the same cheap model. The only real way out of this is to have people born with good quality organs to start with.
Does this mean that a doctor can extract stem cells from me, clone a genetically designed pig with a suitable spare part for my body and then make a transplant without any complications and added toxins to prevent my body from rejecting the organ. In that case it sounds great
How do they address the issue that most cloned animals turn out sick, I don't want a sick organ in replacement for my allready sick organ!
Well, we use to get insulin straight from pigs so why not a whole pancreas?
Now if they harvest organs from these pigs with human DNA, does that mean we can't eat the leftovers without being cannibals?
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
I believe its acceptable to harvest pigs for organs, since we already harvest them for food. Since we're willing to butcher them and eat them, there shouldn't be any ethical objection to butchering them for parts.
On the other hand, we don't eat humans. And somehow, I don't think it would be economically viable to start breeding humans with pig organs, so we could eat them. Thus, you've run into a mental block that people will associate with the progress of growing humans for parts.
Now if you suggested breeding pigs with human organs simply for consumption, you'd probably be forbidden by law, on the grounds that its too much like cannibalism.
Basically, if most people would consider eating it, its acceptable to farm and butcher it for whatever purpose you like, especially if it helps humans. On the other hand, if you don't normally eat the thing, I wouldn't suggest trying to use it as a host for organs.
Wouldnt it be "easier" to just have a replacement human with say, no brain (so its not "really" a clone) living assisted by machines waiting for its parts to be harvested?
That's pretty much what this is, but instead of using expensive, complicated machines to keep the organs alive we use cheap, simple pigs.
I am a Karma Library.
Beggars can't be choosers!!! If you're on your deathbed, choose religion or choose science. Why must religion always try to impede progress?
"Ask me about Loom"
1) the book "The Island of Doctor Moreau" comes to mind
2) I've seen people with less cleanliness than these pigs
3) so the suffering of the human who knows that another human MUST die for them to get better.
4) so are flu shots Kosher? they are based on egg protiens...and I doubt they are blessed.
5) so throw away your glasses, contacts, pacemakers, heart bypass surgery, vaccinations...I don't see in the bible (or any other religious text) where it says: "Thou shalt not genetically modify pigs so you can make replacement parts for humans"
I'm religious, and I've been taught that these animals have been put here to help mankind. even in genesis it talks about man having dominion over the animals. I'd have a problem if they said, "sorry we need to make a Mini-me of you and then kill him so you can live".
There comes a point when you just have to get off the pulpit.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Chicken and turkey's aren't mammals, which is probably part of the reason you can't see them harvesting them for human organs. Furthermore, they have size considerations that pigs do not. You probably could picture a cow being used to grow organs though, but I believe (with no substantiation) that pigs are closer to humans then cows.
Besides, I'm a vegetarian, so I don't eat pork either. But the fact that I don't doesn't change society at large, and the fact that they eat pork.
well, at least, if you kick the dirt there's already the main course for the funeral meal...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
All cells in the body carry on their outer membranes molecules that identify them as being part of the body. now finding all these genes, cloning them all into pig cells AND removing all native pig recognition molecules would be the way to go, WERE IT NOT that the pig itself would not be viable 'cause its own cells are not recognized anymore. any slight amount of alien molecules left causes a massive attack of the host immunologic system (white blood cells etc). it is possible to overcome this _PARTIALLY_ by weakening the immunosystem with chemicals.
I reseached the possibilities of pig organ usage for transplantation.. believe me, it might be possible some day, but that day is WAY ahead of us.
the alternative of growing new organs from stem cells (ie programming from the ground up) is up to now a much more promising than modifying pigs (ie patch core components of a massive _unknown_ project while porting it to another OS)
my 2 eurocents
Scientists are creating organs from genetic material, basically growing organs from part bodies. I don't know the logistics, but I'm sure they'd love to be able to create a part human with only a brain stem so we can harvest away.
They want to do that to us all right now. You have a "donor" on your driver's license, don't you?
There is surprisingly little that keeps unscrupulous people from harvesting people like us instead of using a human without the ability to speak or gain consciousness.
Those reared in a laboratory don't have pesky families that would appear on television.
c.
"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."
Even if you can't replace genes with this method, you may be able to do the functional equivalent. For instance, add the new gene, and then add a gene which counteracts the original (antisense, targeted ribozyme, RNA silencing, etc.). So it's entirely possible that you could knock out or replace the marker proteins and sugar-producing pathways. There are an awful lot of them, of course -- but no one ever claimed this would be easy.
"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? "
An obvious observation, of course pig!=human. As for the rest of this, you're a little fuzzy on just what exactly your concerns are. Now, "when these cells replicate", I imagine they should in the course of normal tissue repair and turnover. Are you referring to the possibility that cells will migrate out of the transplant (resulting in microchimerism)? Such a thing could cause some rejection problems, but that's really a minor case compared to the big rejection problem of the whole organ. I would be more concerned about the possibility of porcine immune cells hitching a ride with the organ -- that's a real concern (Note: There shouldn't be enough to cause any sort of GVHD, it's more of problem with increasing rejection risks). There are ways to deplete immune cells, though, I think some of them have been tried (in human organ transplants).
As for the virus, I will assume you mean the problems of introducing possible porcine viruses. For most viruses, you can raise the animals in isolation, and then screen them before/during/after. However, there is one exception -- Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus (PERV -- yes, that's the acronym). I believe it's present in the genome of just about all pigs. It's been a topic of a great deal of research, and for a time it caused an FDA ban of all xenografting trials (since lifted). Although PERV doesn't seem to be able to spread in humans, I imagine that if we could knock out a dozen other genes from the pig genome, we could probably knock out the viral sequence too.
"How do we know what will happen?"
How about finding out by the empirical method?
"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."
I'll agree with you here, it's another case of an attention-grabbing sensational headline.
-Guppy
not to mention the possibility of cross-over disease. . one of the biggest (and scariest) causes of new disease is the development of a virus previously only viable in a non-human host, to the point that it can now take up board in a human host . . how can they prevent a previously un-sequenced pig virus from finding a way into the cells of it's cosy new human host? short of breeding sterile pigs with built in anti-viral encoding protiens or something :/
there was an episode a few years back where they transplanted babboon livers into two hepatitis patiens, both of whom died from the combination of 4 'hidden' viruses. . . one of which is homologous to HIV . . if they hadn't died so soon this could have caused a major epidemiological event with a new strain of HIV possibly entering our society. .
i for one don't want such a direct new pathway for virii being opened up, that's for sure. . .
Pig. Even if you managed to have a pig brain in an otherwise human body somehow, the result would still not be human. We don't know exactly what makes us human, but we do know that most of whatever it is resides in the brain.
What of the breeding of dogs, cattle, etc. that humans have been doing for centuries? A poodle
is a result of genetic engineering too.
Considered harmful.
Couple that with people's attitudes towards cloning, and what kind of chance do half-human pigs have?
Pigs, like many species, have a large number of resident viruses, particularly retroviruses. They and the pigs are well-adapted for each other, and the pigs show little to no ill effect. Some of them are likely so benign to the pigs that we have no idea that they're there. (Indeed, many of these are revealed only by genetic analysis.)
But then what do we want to do? Stick a pig organ in Grandma to save her life, or at least prolong it for a while? So, we've got a person who was unhealthy to begin with, we introduce dozens of foreign viruses directly into the body, and, to top it all off, we completely suppress the immune system so that the organ isn't rejected. I'm not sure that I can even imagine a a scenario more favorable for a virus to make the species jump. And if one did, you can bet that we wouldn't have much natural resistance to it...
While there are justafiable fears about GM pigs, you missed them all. Here are the fears that actually have some basis in reality.
- GM pigs have both pig and human organs in them. This means that pig diseases will "learn" to infect human organs. This will result in pig diseases crossing the gap into the human world, possibly bringing new and dangerous plagues to us. I don't want hoof and mouth disease.
- Humans carrying GM organs can do the same thing. Any human carrying a GM pig organ should not eat pig mean - from a biological perspective, it is very close to cannibalism. While cannibalism is morally wrong for a variety of good reasons, there are good biological reasons it is wrong to. Mainly, eating food of your own biology sets you at risk for every disease that is festering in that corpse - diseases that would not be able to infect you if you were eating a more alien animal (like a chicken). The fact that pigs are already close to human biology is both why the research is possible, and why pork is never served rare (or at all to some religions). Being that much closer raises the risk even higher.
1) Nobody knows what might happen if these pigs somehow were released into the wild. A new species of 'super-pig' could potentionally cause wisespread damage if they escaped captivity
No.
2) Pigs are dirty, they typically roll in their own feces. This is not an appropriate animal to use for 'human' organs.
No. Having a dirty skin does not have any impact of the quality of the organ.
3) Using Pigs in such a fasion is inhumane. Nobody knows the pain these pigs could live with because we have set off certain gene sequences we should not have
Pigs that are used for food are treated very poorly, and go through great pains. If this really is a concern of yours, start by balking at that problem, which affects many orders of magnitude more pigs.
4) Pigs are not kosher, and Jewish or Moslems would not be able to benefit from these advances. That's alienting 1/5 of the planet right there from being able to benefit from this.
Is this a representative attitude of yours? If something cannot benefit everyone, then it should not be done? If such logic had been widely practiced we would still live in caves.
5) We are tampering with God's work. Pigs were created perfect the way they are, as are we. Toying with genes is tampering with God's perfect work and SHOULD not be done under any sane principals.
Pigs, the way they are, were created by man, through millenia of genetic manipulation (specifically, selective breeding). Sorry, the harm has already been done.
Tor