Slashdot Mirror
The Mass Production of Living Tissue
An anonymous reader sends in this moderately disturbing quote from Gizmodo:
"I'm touching a wet slab of protein, what feels like a paper-thin slice of bologna. It's supple, slimy, but unlike meat, if you were to slice it down the center today, tomorrow the wound would heal. It's factory-grown living tissue. The company behind the living, petri-dish-grown substance known as Apligraf hates my new name for it: meat band-aid. 'It's living,' Dr. Damien Bates, Chief Medical Officer at Organogenesis, corrects me. 'Meat isn't living.' But no one argues with me that this substance is really just a band-aid. A living, $1500 band-aid, I should say. Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. But Organogenesis is not interested in creating boutique organs for proof of concept scientific advancement. They're a business in the business of mass tissue manufacturing — and the first of its kind."
Many a SciFi story I've read has used this kind of thing for wounds. I wonder how soon until they have it to the point where these slices are vacuum packed and you can open it and stuff it into a wound in the field?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
So when you rub your scars you induce swelling!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
how does it taste?
...this tech will finally deliver fully realized COTS pornstar-branded vaginas. At which point the world will end.
This sounds like incredibly great news for burn victims, given development.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
This sounds highly promising for traditionally traumatic and fatal wounds, particularly burns. It will be interesting to see if this product increases the rate of survival in burn victims and other similar traumas. You have to love modern medicine.
Wank off. We'll save $20
I don't get why this is news. This company and this product have been around for like 20 years.
Soylent Green is Wankers!
Table-ized A.I.
Band-Aid®?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The hospital in question was using disused foreskin to create eyelids for burn victims. Alas, they all turned out to be cock-eyed after the procedure!
Chopping up virgins' bits and pieces and turning it into a medical treatment!
Human horn is real!
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
but unlike meat, if you were to slice it down the center today, tomorrow the wound would heal.
Yeah, because there never even was a animal who cut itself, and where then the wound healed...
FAIL
That would be called a fleshwound. A wound to its flesh or tissues. Meat is the same tissue, but terminally locked into 'deadness'.
There is a difference.
Now, is this the new protein or the bologna?
Sounds really promising for those who want to be cannibals. Just grow it using samples from your tastier friends (or from yourself, for the ultimate: survivable self-cannibalism). The price might have to come down a little, of course, or it will remain an expensive delicacy.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions)
I expected them to follow that list up with 'and a few other things'.
Screw 'meat bandaid', call it 'hotdog bandaid' instead.
There's no place like
I am not sure why this item was introduced as "moderately disturbing". If you will permit me, I will explain what it is, since I use it regularly. (I have no stock nor other biased affiliation with the company or product.) The product first came on the market in 1998, over 10 years ago. It has a well-established place in the treatment of chronic wounds. It is not the only product in the category of "living cell therapies" for chronic wounds. The other product is Dermagraft, similar, and likewise around for nearly 10 years. When Apligraf first came out, it was promoted as skin-graft-in-a-box. It is not. It is allogeneic material (recipients will reject it), and thus it does not "take" to the body like an autogenous skin graft. In its earliest years, when the company was promoting it as a skin graft, it got some high profile press because it was put to good use as readily available biological coverage for burn victims of the 9-11-2001 twin towers catastrophe. The company that makes it, Organogenesis, partnered with pharma giant Novartis for marketing and product management, and under them, they listened to customers who told them it was not skin grafts in a box, and they redefined its marketing for chronic wounds. The product management has been back in the hands of Organogenesis for about 3 or 4 years now.
The material is essentially a poly-pharmaceutical packaged in a living material. The raw materials come from donated foreskins. Extensive safety testing is done. Pure extracted fibroblasts are put into cell culture, where they do their business and re-form a collagen matrix equivalent to normal dermis. After that, pure keratinocytes are cultured on top of the dermis, and an epidermis forms. The product is shipped in its petri dish, as a circle of 44 sq cm area. The Gizmodo article shows a picture of it. As a living material, its procurement and handling are a bit different than most medical devices, but it is easy to get and apply.
The juvenile cells in the material make a broad spectrum of growth factors and other biochemicals which have a positive pro-proliferative effect on wounds. The role for this material is for chronic and pathological wounds. The company got its market approval and indications from the FDA for studies done on diabetic and venous ulcers, but the material is useful for chronic and pathological ("cap") wounds of any cause. Like anything else, it does not work for all wounds or patients, but it is fairly predictable, and its results can be rather dramatic. When a cap wound of whatever cause has been treated to the point that disease is quiet, inflammation is gone, and the wound should be healing but it is not, then that is when wound stimulatory therapies are applied. There are several available, and Apligraf has been one of the flagship products in this category for 10 years now. Many wounds which simply will not budge no matter what will take off and heal once this is applied.
Organogenesis has its first new product coming out soon, for oral mucosa and gingiva, so perhaps that is why they are trying to stir up some attention with articles like the one quoted. However, it is not Brave New World nor Coma nor any other meat factory. It is just on the leading edge of biological therapeutics in the 21st century. And if Slashdotters want to make lots of jokes as they often do, like "put Viagra in the petri dish to grow more", well, we've already heard them all.
(All very timely, since I just gave a presentation on this last week (and have been for 8 years). If you want to learn more, I posted a copy of the presentation on the website I use for posting talks and presentations and whatnot. This particular talk has a mix of my slides and company slides. It is NOT yet annotated with full text on each slide, so some will just be pictures and you will have to infer what you can, but text should be coming one of these days:
http://www.arimedica.com/content/arimedica_apligraf_(partially%20annotated)_2005-1006.pdf
Again, I have no investment nor bias here, I just use this stuff in practice because it works and it's an important product.)
I think that circumcision had been around a few years longer then this product. So you want people to be in pain longer and possible die instead of using some tissue that is going to be discarded anyway? I never understood why people are so against circumcision. If I could meet the doctor who did mine, I would shake his hand and say "Good Job, chicks love my cock"
I never understood why people are so against circumcision.
I don't think many people are against circumcision per se -- if you want one, have one. What people are against is forcibly circumcising people who did not agree to be circumsized.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Somehow I was reminded of this story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8360569.stm
The Mohel's cat will be disappointed.
I had a friend who once thought of using cancer based tumors on cattle to make the most anti-PETA meat known to man.
This might finally change all the viagra spam.
New and improved "factory" model spam instead. It will be a sick, sick day the spam changes ...
...it's a real growth industry.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration.
Finally, a band-aid made out of human penises!
Can't believe I didn't think of it.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
They should trademark it as "4Skin".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The notion of using *healthy* tissue harvested from *unconsenting*, helpless children for sale to manufacture products raises serious ethical concerns and questions. It is treating children and their bodies like objects, like agricultural products to be harvested and exploited for the benefit of others. This is nothing less than organ trafficking, no different than the harvesting of other body parts from a child for sale on the market. This technology is already illegal (as organ trafficking) in many countries.
Circumcision itself is unethical (destruction of a healthy part of a childs body, without the proper justification that is required for amputation, a serious or life threatening disease requiring immediate treatment which is present and current and cannot be treated by lesser invasive means), and this just adds to the unethical nature of it. Children are not livestock for their bodies to be treated like objects, to be cut up or harvested at a whim, they are human beings with independant rights of their own, one of the most basic is a right to a whole body and to not have their bodies cut up and mutilated by others. It is already technically classified as a battery under general legal principles applying to the rights of the person. The boys and their bodies deserve equal protection as girls already enjoy from such unnecessary genital mutilations. Male circumcision can be compared to female circumcision. In fact, common male circumcision is more invasive than many types of common female circumcision such as removal of the clitoral hood which removes less tissue than male circumcision. Obviously, if female circumcision were done in sterile conditions by doctors, even out of fears of diseases the child does not have, or that it is lesser invasive than other types of circumcision, does not make it acceptable, and the same standard should apply to boys.
That gives a whole new meaning to the term "teabagging."
Err, wrong article.
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
So what's the big deal, boys are going to be circumcised anyway, why not profit from it?
It's the profit motive that's the problem.
Parents report being pressured by hospital staff to circumcise their newborn sons. In fact, the anti-circumcision organization IntactAmerica.org was originally funded by couple in response to their disgust at having been pressured to have their boy cut.
Infant boys' foreskins may be very valuable to tissue engineering companies but they are more valuable and rightfully belong to the boys themselves.
Infant circumcision is an unnecessary amputation that cannot be refused by the prospective amputee himself. That makes it a forced amputation, a very serious human rights violation.
Circumcision advocates within the CDC are now pushing to get the agency to endorse circumcision as an HIV preventative. Sounds great, but if you read further there is no real claim of effectiveness. You still have to wear a condom if you want to be actually protected from infection. The circumcision-HIV experiment has already been conducted on a mass scale and the result was negative. America has the highest circumcision rate in the developed world and also the highest HIV rate. Perhaps that's why circumcision advocates are careful to say that you still need to wear a condom. Being cut is simply of no use in fighting HIV.
So why push parents to have their baby boy cut when it's not going to protect him from anything?
Follow the money. Amputating infant foreskins is a billion dollar business. And now someone else wants his foreskin, the tissue engineering companies.
The mass production of living tissue would be a fine development if it didn't depend on infant foreskins. Treating non-consenting minors as a source of spare parts violates our most basic ethical standards.
It is a slippery slope. The fact that circumcision has been now been monetised as a organ harvesting adds financial reasons to continue what is essentially an unethical practice that destroys a healthy part of a little boys body, that has nothing wrong with it, a part they are born with, not to treat a current medical condition. We have ended up in a position where indeed this corporation is involved with the extraction of healthy body parts from a child's body. The fact that genital mutilation of boys began some time before does not change the fact of what is happening right now. The fact that, for instance, lets say a chinese organ recipient recieves a heart that was taken from a child, and were aware of it, the fact that they did not encourage the child to give up his heart does not absolve them of guilt for being complicit in this transaction. The fact that the corporation pays doctors to take the amputated genital organ is itself an encouragement of the practice. Even if donated, the recieving party is still involved in a crime of organ trafficking.
Trafficking amputation of genitals of children is basically one crime on top of another, genital mutilation of the child. The principle of equal protection requires that boys be given equal protection from amputation of medically normal parts of their genitals, as females are already given such protection from even the piercing of a girls genitals.
Seriously, whoever it was that told you circumcised men can't actually feel sex was pulling your leg.
Well, maybe you could start by getting the practice of forcibly tearing holes in the ears of children who did not agree to have their ears pierced, and work your way up. Then after you get circumcision outlawed, you can work on getting the practice of forcibly puncturing holes into the arms and legs of children who did not agree for the purpose of injecting diseases into them.
destruction of a healthy part of a childs body, without the proper justification that is required for amputation, a serious or life threatening disease requiring immediate treatment which is present and current and cannot be treated by lesser invasive means
So, I take it you have ethical problems with haircuts too then?
One good reason to be against circumcision is the high propensity of the botched circumcision, often not noticed until adulthood.
http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org/botch.htm
The most scary case is this one:
http://www.moss-fritch.com/medical_error.htm
Where one Baby boy was snipped way too much and the doctor's decided to give him hormones to become a girl instead.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Totally invalid comparison. 1) Hair regrows. 2) Hair is not a living part of the body. Using your flawed argument it would be ok to chop off a childs arm because this is not not different on an ethical level to cutting hair. The difference is arm, skin, parts of a boys genital flesh, and other organs are living parts of the body and do not regrow, thus cutting them off is permenant. If you removed the hair follicles from a childs scalp so the hair could not regrow, this would be an ethical problem.
I didn't mean couldn't "feel" entirely. I'm sure they plenty enjoy it too, but you can't tell me cutting off a bundle of nerve endings has no affect.
if all the thousands of nerve endings and other complex structures were able to regrow to form an intact foreskin in only a few years, the way hair does (because hairs fall out, and get replaced), then my opposition to circumcision would be far less, since it would be trivially reversible. However, there is currently no technique capable of restoring those destroyed tissues, only poor substitutes.
If you seriously think that irreversibly destroying living tissue of any kind, let alone the most sensitive part of the male anatomy) except in the direst circumstances is even remotely comparable to cutting entrirely dead tissue which is naturally regrown, you are completely out of your mind.
But do you even remember being intact? If you have nothing to compare it to, you wouldn;t know what you are missing.
But do you even remember being intact? If you have nothing to compare it to, you wouldn;t know what you are missing.
You're right -- I don't remember being intact, and I don't know what I'm missing. I'm not sure how that's relevant though; if someone had cut off my legs at birth, I wouldn't now know what it's like to have legs either -- but that wouldn't mean it was acceptable to chop off infants' legs.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I would also add i do not hear too many people trying to legitimise female genital mutilation which is equivalent to male circumcision (clitoral hood removal), with the argument that it is no different from cutting a childs hair. I think such a conclusion would be laughed at because it should be obvious that cutting off a living part of a childs body that cannot grow back is much different than cutting a childs hair which does grow back. As well, it is also unethical to give a child a tattoo, cut off their earlobes, nipples, or other "unnecessary" body parts when there is no present medical condition involving these parts, and likewise, we shouldnt amputate part of a childs genitals which are have nothing wrong with them.
The foreskin also has significant function, including half of the nerve endings (at least) of the penis being heavily loaded with pleasure sensitive nerve endings. The loss of sensivity due to circumcision due to the simple fact that the skin surface of the penis is being reduced and thus the number of nerve endings is reduced, is bound to be significant. Truly the person whose body it is is the only one who can assess the value of a body part for themselves. A body part which seems useless to be one might be considered indespensible for another, even if for simply aesthetic reasons.
Circumcision is a permenant alteration which cannot be undone, it is a surgical amputation, when commited on healthy children violates the same ethical principles that dictate that cutting off a boys nipples, earlobes, pulling out their entire fingernail, tattoo of children, removing their hair roots so their hair cannot grow back, and other irreversible surgeries and so on, are unethical.
That was more or less my point. He should care, because it is unacceptable.
Because if they can grow spines and hearts then they are desperately needed in Washington D.C. stat!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
That's ok think of the foresight they'll have!
I don't feel anything on my cock when I'm having sex other than warmth/wetness, there is no pleasurable feeling on it except the head when having an orgasm. The only way I can even orgasm while having sex is by grinding once all the way in and feeling my girl against me around my dick, mostly between it and my legs. I love getting head but only from watching it occur because otherwise I don't feel a fucking thing almost except, as previously stated, during orgasm.
you seem to assume that the nerve endings that were removed during circumcision don't reconnect, I tent to assume circumcised males have more nerve ending per unit of area make the sensations more concentrated and maybe you don't know what you are missing.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The various parts of the penis, including the foreskin, form a functional whole. The foreskin is the primary sensory tissue of the penis. The ridged band of the foreskin is built to trigger orgasm and ejaculation.
There are specialised structures in the ridged band which detect the gliding action of the glans.
Even if the nerves have some function after circumcision, they would be severely damaged and buried under a layer of scar tissue, and would not function in the same way. (This ignores whether any particular circumcised male has enough shaft skin left for the gliding action to even be possible.)
http://research.cirp.org/func1.html
There are also Oestrogen receptors and other structures present in the mucosal lining of the foreskin, and their function is not known, but should not be overlooked.
As a matter of fact, I can. Humans simply cannot process all of their nerve endings at once. Your kind of sound bite could also be use to claim that big penises obviously feel better than small ones. After all, you can't tell me that an extra two inches of penis with nerve endings has no effect.
That is very unfortunate for you. Although, I'm not sure if you are arguing that circumcision doesn't matter because you can't feel your penis anyway, or if you are blaming circumcision for the lack of feeling in the rest of your penis.
"Solyent Green is Foreskins! Solyent Green is discarded Foreskins! No. Really. They collect them for the keratinocyte stem cells. It's all quite safe."
Doesn't have quite the same punch, but at least it's corrected for accuracy.
Allah be merciful! Is it Halal?
Blaming it as the foreskin #1 contains a shitload of nerves, and #2 prevents the excessive rubbing against clothing and such and thereby dulling the nerves that are left.
Can this be the start of the price of hamburger going way down? Meat without need for the cow, the chicken, or the turkey could be a boon to the entire world. It could also give us a use for all the abandoned factory space in America. Now if they can grow nice leather I could use some new upholstery.
You've been conned by sound bites. Neither rubbing against clothing, nor the removal of nerve ending at the end of the shaft will keep you from feeling the rest of your penis, including the nerve ending that are on the inside of your penis, which is what you are claiming. While the claim of less feeling on the head is theoretically possible, even if extreamly unlikely, the fact that the rest of your penis has no feeling makes your claim sounds more like wanting a scape goat for an unfortunate genetic trait.
Generally, by the time an animal is regarded as being meat, it is not alive...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This I take it is a dig against vaccination?
If it is, then you're missing an important part of the social contract : you get your health care free at the point of use regardless of whether you pay taxes for it in return for your cooperation in controlling the spread of diseases. That means not shitting in the drinking water reservoirs, not spitting your TB-laden sputum into the faces of passers-by, and in this case, exposing your children to a controlled low risk of various mild diseases so that my children (if I had any) are not exposed to the uncontrolled horrible diseases that your children are likely to catch and transmit before they die (slowly and in pain).
If you ask me, parents like you should be free to not have their children vaccinated ; but by opting out of the social contract like this, the parents should themselves lose the right to healthcare, education, policing, etc. (The children being innocent of wrongdoing in this should of course retain full rights.)
What do you mean, you don't have health care in your country? I thought SlashDot only accepted submissions from the civilised world.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Meat is the same tissue, but terminally locked into 'deadness'
It would appear that we are all undead.
Actually it is not a dig on vaccination. It is a dig against people who make statements condeming parents for making health decisions for their kids, and base the condemnation on hyperbole and sound bites. But, since the rest of your post is just the parroting of dogma, it doesn't suprise me that you didn't catch anything that didn't match up with your pre-defined stereotypes.
But there is usually no medical reason for circumcision, and it is those cases that I, and I assume the GP, am opposed to.
He may well have had an excessively tight circumcision, in which case the proper gliding action of the penis would have been lost, meaning there is only the rubbing left to produce any stimulation. I seem to recall a post implying that you are circumcised, in which case if you have a loose circumcision you should be very thankful.
the large penis would have near enough the same number of nerve endings as a smaller one, just spread out over a larger area. That doesn't really make a difference though, since the whole thing is getting stimulated.
You idiot, that's not the band-aid... that's the lunch meat!!!
Then what the hell did we have for lunch with the soup!!!
The medical reason is exactly the same as for immunizations. It is preventative. Would you absolutly have a medical problem if you didn't have the procedure? No. Can it prevent medical problems? Yes. Do you know ahead of time whether your child will be effected or not? No.
Take the flu vaccine for example. How many kids have a needle stabbed into their bodies, and disease injected when they were not going to get the flu anyway, and even if they did, it would just be a minor inconvenience. Or worse yet, the chicken pox vaccine, where it may actually INCRESE the chances of medical problems for the kid so that the parents and the schools can make a few extra bucks. Even the polio vaccine, had no "medical reason" for most children. I happen to think the pay off is worth it for the polio vaccine, but I am absolutly aware that I agreed to have my child injected because otherwise he MIGHT have a bigger problem.
Making the claim that circumcision is wrong, while immunization is right is hypocritical. What the 'right' risks and actions to take with our own children is not a black and white issue. It is a shades of grey. Immunization and circumcision are awfully close in the grey scale.
That is just wrong. He claims not to feel an friction, and does not have any feeling that is not on the surface. Neither of these would have been effected by an excessively tight circumcision. Also, skin streatches, so masterbation would resolve an excessively tight circumcision.
Are you claiming that the human body has a fixed number of nerve endings? So, are you saying that Matt Roloff is going to be twice as sensative on every part of his body than Michael Jordan? Really?
The claim that the number of nerve endings in humans is fixed irrelevent of size, or even amongst people of the same size is highly dubious, and certainly needs some sort of citation.