One month after experimental pig heart transplant, doctors say they see no signs of rejection or infection::One month after an experimental procedure to transplant the heart of a genetically modified pig into a patient with end-stage heart disease, doctors say the heart is functioning on its own and shows no signs of rejection.

  • kinther@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Cool technology, but kind of fucked up we grow animals with spare parts for us only to take them out and kill them. Once this gets to the point we can grow them in a petri dish the ethical concerns should no longer be an issue.

    • Nevoic
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      11 months ago

      If you’re not a vegan this is a super weird take. Hell, as a vegan myself, I don’t have a massive issue with trading pig lives for human lives. Yes it’d be ideal if we did it in other ways, but there’s an actually decent argument that it’s permissible and even good to save humans by killing animals.

      Killing pigs because “mmm bacon” though? Yeah that’s a bad reason. Pleasure doesn’t permit suffering, most humans understand that unlees it’s their own pleasure they’re talking about.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
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        11 months ago

        It’s a weird take to think it’s fine to trade pig lives for human lives? I think it’s absolutely brutal and shows how cruel humans are to other species once again. And we are not even ashamed of it.

        • Nevoic
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          11 months ago

          The take in isolation isn’t weird, but if they’re not vegan it is weird, because it’s inconsistent.

          Saying “it’s not okay to trade pig lives for human lives” while also saying “it’s okay to trade pig lives because bacon tastes yummy” is the weird/inconsistent part.

          I’m not hard sold one way or another on trading pig lives for human lives. I’ve been a human supremacist my whole life (only been vegan for 3 years), and I recognize I might have a bias that needs to be unlearned. It’s possible that pig lives are worth the same as human lives and I’m just bigoted against them.

          I’m still vegan though, it’s incredibly easy to recognize that pig lives are worth more than taste pleasure. The harder questions come in when we’re talking life/death instead of just sensory pleasure.

          • 1984@lemmy.today
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            11 months ago

            People are inconsistent all the time, that’s why I don’t think it’s weird at all. Almost all humans buy meat but almost all humans would be unable to work in a slaughter house and see what happens there.

            It’s only weird if you don’t understand how the human mind works.

            • Nevoic
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              11 months ago

              Or if you view the human mind as weird generally. Our intelligence affords us an unusual ability to be inconsistent in our ideologies, other creatures can’t normally hold that kind of dissonance in their head due to lack of complexity.

              So yeah I was calling the inconsistency weird. There’s this weird interim between primal stupidity and enlightened intelligence where humans are, where we’re able to reason about the world and can still choose to be illogical or inconsistent.

        • Redrum714
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          11 months ago

          That’s how life works, nothing weird about it if you’re not sheltered and overly sensitive

      • kinther@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Given the hivemind that are social media websites and their tendency to lean toward “mmm bacon”, you never know who will react when you talk about the ethics behind killing animals. Even planting the seed of considering them not just bio-bags of spare organs could lead someone to question their consumption of meat down the road.

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      I think it’s much less fucked than growing them just for food we don’t actually need to eat, just luxury. And we do that on an absurdly large scale.

    • funkajunk
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      11 months ago

      What if the rest of the animal is used as food?

      • CouncilOfFriends@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        I think their point of view was as if we were judged by an intelligent alien species, where we would have to admit yeah it does look fucked

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    “The physicians taking care of him believe his heart function is excellent,” said Dr. Bartley Griffith, director of the Cardiac and Lung Transplant Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who performed the surgery.

    Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of UMMC’s Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program, said in an update shared on Friday, “we are withdrawing all the drugs that were initially supporting his heart.

    “We are working very hard with our physical therapy team who are spending a lot of time helping him regain the strength that he’s lost during last one month of hospital stay,” Mohiuddin said.

    Faucette is a married father of two from Frederick, Maryland, and a 20-year Navy veteran who had most recently worked as a lab technician at the National Institutes of Health.

    “My only real hope left is to go with the pig heart, the xenotransplant,” Faucette told the hospital in an internal interview several days before the surgery.

    Mohiuddin and Griffith established the country’s first center for cardiac xenotransplantation research and performed the first such experimental surgery on 57-year-old David Bennett in January 2022.


    The original article contains 906 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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      11 months ago

      The last guy died after 2 months and didn’t show any signs of rejection either… I wouldn’t break out the party yet.

      • candyman337@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        That’s because he happened to get a verry treatable infection but was already immunocompromised. The pig heart was never the issue

      • kescusay@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        That’s true, but he may very well have died due to a virus the tissue was infected with. There’s no sign this heart has the same issue.

      • flooppoolf@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The other guy refused to take his medication properly and was warned that he would otherwise die