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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."
AFAIK rejection rates from human-human transplants are quite high, and the search for compatible donors quite hard.
What did they do to surpass these two ? did they made them 100% compatible with everyone ? are they only compatible with the original human dna-donor for the pigs?
Should we start saving now to have a pig with our replacement liver (for beer) and heart (fried chicken & ribs) ?
If a living being has a human heart, a human liver, and human kidneys ... is it closer to pig or human ? i mean, when do we stop ? 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 ?
I am having a kind of matrixy vison rite now, only its humans that own the storage facility.
Scary
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.
If they don't want to benefit, they don't have to. It's not their decision what other people do, though. We don't ban the use of antibiotics for bacterial infections just because a few people might have religious beliefs against them.
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.
We are God's work as well. If He did not want us to do this, he should not have made us capable. That's assuming He exists, but we'll stay away from that argument for today. Also, I don't think you can describe a pig as perfect. They do, as you mentioned earlier, roll around in their own feces.
Question at this point is... having pigs so close to human DNA does it constitute canibalisim if you have bacon at breakfast? let alone the crap McDonalds sells for breakfast...well I guess that may as well be.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
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.
;), and I don't have a clue to boot.
IANAJ (first time I've ever used that particular acronym!), but I believe there is a doctrine which states that the importance of a human life far outweighs any of the kosher requirements -- for instance, it would be okay to eat pork if you were starving and that was the last item of food you had left. I imagine that a pig organ transplant would fall into the same classification.
As for muslims, IANAM
So.. Anyone care to wager how long it takes for a clerical error to allow one of these pigs to interbreed with a normal one, and produce offspring that ends up in your hotdog?
Oink!
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I think you're a little confused here:
cloning == creating an organism with a DNA identical to a source DNA
transgenics == implanting DNA from one specie to sperm, eggs or fertilized egg from another specie.
If I read the article correctly they are doing transgenics, not cloning.
also, the article does not say anything on stem cells.
You seem to be interested, but not knowledgeable, for a very good basic biology book I recomend Keeton & Gould.
Working for necessity's mother.
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
yes, not only is this allowed by jewish law, it is a great "MITZVA" to save a human life.
And using pigs will cancel the current moral problems with human-donor transplants (when is the donor considered dead ? i.e. when is taking his vitals is no longer considered murder ? )
Working for necessity's mother.
A bit OT, I think, but I wanted to correct a point made in the thread- Actually, there are some cases where things other than eating are prohibited - namely, in the case of mixing milk and meat, cooking and deriving benefit (e.g. selling) are also prohibited.
However, since this only applies to kosher animals, while you would be forbidden to sell a cheeseburger, selling a cheese BLT would technically be ok. Counter-intuitive, but quite true.
Anyway, back on topic - clearly the situation would be one of saving a life, in which case, it is not just permissible to use such measures - it would be a requirement (as long at it were the best option: here is the fudge factor - e.g. no one will claim rejecting an operation with a 50% mortality rate is violating anything). That is, Kashrut (Kosher laws) are not suspended for serious medicine, they simply don't apply.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
Probably, although it wouldn't involve machines. One way this might work is as follows. A doctor would take a sample of your DNA and place it into an egg, creating a clone. That egg can be carried by a surrogate mother, or possibly implanted back into you (eggs can develop pretty much anywhere). When the organ that is needed has started to form, the embryo is removed, the developing organ is removed from the embryo, transplanted into you, and the rest of the embryo destroyed. When the transplanted organ has matured, your original defective organ is removed.
Some organs might need to develop long enough that it becomes a concern whether the developing embryo has some kind of higher brain activity. In that case, the doctor could make sure that the embryo develops without higher brain functions--it would start out ``brain dead'', roughly the same way at which we already harvest organs.
Where does one draw the line ethically? Hard to say. I find it difficult to see why human cloning should raise significant ethical problems as long as the clone does not develop higher brain functions.
I think they should create a pig that creates O+ and every other type human compatible blood. Then we could have farms of blood donor pigs. The red cross could setup this ultra sterile facility just for harvesting blood.
As for the organs, I think this is a great step forward in being able to save peoples lives. However, my preferred method would be to grow cloned organs in vats. I think it would be cool if you could pay a company and they would take a blood sample from you and make a whole bunch of organs and put them in the deep freeze so when you need them, all the doctor has todo is make a phone call and ta-da, a copy of your existing heart shows up in 3 hours.
In a more far fetched idea...keeping with the idea that you could in the future transfer your brain to a computer, you could start cloning a copy of yourself and when the clones ready, transfer your essence into the new body! Though, how you could go the other direction really isn't clear.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.