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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) ?
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.
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.
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.