30 ms·
Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
- drenvuk 5y agoI'm a full on speciesist. let's do more of this. since we're already eating them I feel like this even a more reasonable usage of their lives. can we do kidneys next please? we can basically shut down most dialysis clinics after that.
- pkaye 5y agoThey did so a pig to human kidney transplant recently however it was on a brain dead man as an initial test. Probably soon it be on a living patient. As a person on a kidney transplant waitlist, it given me some hope for the future. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-pig-to-human-transplant-donated-body.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-pig-to-human-transpla...
- spoonjim 5y ago
- capableweb 5y agoCalm your horses. His body was donated to science by the family, I'm sure they knew what he wanted and did just that.
- bobthechef 5y ago
- aqme28 5y agoWhy do you say it’s non-consensual? He donated his body to science.
- moffkalast 5y agoMight as well then also get consent from cadavers to do autopsy lmao.
- mrguyorama 5y agoDon't we actually do that? By getting consent before death?
- tiagod 5y agoWhat's your source that states it was non consensual?
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoThe next logical step is to breed pigs with organs that especially suit humans, maybe with some genetic engineering to optimise them. I really can't see anyone needing an organ complaining that they're GMO. As long as we treat animals well while they're alive (and why wouldn't you, you want high quality low stress organs) then there's really no limit here, morally.
- mapme 5y agoWouldn’t you need to kill the animal in the prime of its life, causing a moral issue?
- Pxtl 5y agoFood animals are killed in adolescence for far less noble reasons. I'm a vegetarian. Grow me a goddamned lung pig.
- mapme 5y agoI understand your view and agree with what you’ve said, however, the primary point was that there are moral implications if you intervene in another life so it is not a moral freebie.
- drenvuk 5y agoPigs reach slaughter weight at about 6 months[0] and the lifetime of a domestic pig is 15 to 20 years. Their breeding age is 8+ months. So we kill them before they reach the prime of their life most of the time. Killing them at their prime might be less of a moral issue than what we do currently. [0]https://modernfarmer.com/2016/05/raising-pigs/#:~:text=Most%20pig%20farmers%20buy%20%E2%80%9Cweaners,they're%206%20months%20old https://modernfarmer.com/2016/05/raising-pigs/#:~:text=Most%....
- mapme 5y agoThat is an interesting comparison to other reasons why we kill animals, however, the point wasn’t a relative moral comparison to animal slaughter for food purposes but that it’s not zero cost morality wise to kill an animal in its prime.
- asdff 5y agoThe adage "use the whole buffalo" has never really died out in terms of meat processing. There's a lot of good product in an animal and you can find buyers for all of it. There's the obvious stuff like hotdogs, sure, but even stuff like the blood is also important. Fetal bovine serum, a supplement for cell culture media, for example comes from the slaughterhouse and is extremely important for biomedical research.
- croisillon 5y agoAnd the next step would be to eat the humans who've had an animal transplant, sounds all good and logical to me.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoThat is such a ridiculous comment, I had a mighty chuckle.
- moffkalast 5y agoIf you replace a human organ by organ with one from a pig, is he still the original human? Ship of piggus.
- sjg007 5y agoWe basically have at least as many or more bacteria cells in us than human cells so are we actually a microbe?
- croisillon 5y agoAsk the speciesist ;)
- moffkalast 5y agoHey I'm not speciesist, some of my best friends are bacteria!
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- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cameronh90 5y agoI'm vegetarian and have no issue with using animals for medical purposes like this. It's one thing to kill for pleasure as in fur, cosmetics and food, but quite another to kill an animal to save a human life. I am pretty sure even most vegans would be happy to accept an animal death to save their own life, even a pet. Similarly, I guess, I was vegan but I had to stop that diet as it caused severe health problems for me.
- inglor_cz 5y agoOnce you kill the pig for its heart and kidneys, you might as well eat it. Better than letting the nutritional value of the meat go to waste. That wouldn't be a lot of pigs, true, and a pork chop of that origin would be pretty expensive.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoNothing in an animal for slaughter goes to waste, they're too expensive for that. I mean the value of various parts like organ meat varies by what it's used for, but eventually everything is used up. A lot of offal ends up in animal feed, for example. And their hooves end up in keratine supplements for the gymbros.
- inglor_cz 5y agoThese are genetically altered pigs with human genes inserted, though. I can see some people being uneasy about consuming them, either from moral or pragmatic (possible pathogenicity) point of view.
- cameronh90 5y agoPerhaps I'm somewhat of an atypical veg, but I am okay with that - although I personally wouldn't as I no longer like meat. I also would not ban meat consumption if I was a dictator, but I would enforce extremely high ethical standards, carbon neutrality and proper management of agricultural effluent. I suspect that would make a pork chop pretty expensive too.
- nikkinana 5y ago
- phnofive 5y agoDiscussed here fifteen days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882912 Not a huge update but an interesting discussion of FDA approval; can the FDA actually stop or sanction experimental procedures like this?
- hprotagonist 5y ago>can the FDA actually stop or sanction experimental procedures like this? They explicitly permitted this operation, by means of https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/expanded-access https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/expanded... Sometimes called “compassionate use”, expanded access is a potential pathway for a patient with an immediately life-threatening condition or serious disease or condition to gain access to an investigational medical product (drug, biologic, or medical device) for treatment outside of clinical trials when no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy options are available.
- jostmey 5y agoYes, the FDA will insert itself to regulate medicine wherever it can. For example, the FDA has been pushing to regulate diagnostic tests as medical devices. It’s funny how Americans surrender medical autonomy to the government but draw a strict line in the sand in other issues
- e-clinton 5y agoEveryone who isn’t an HCP “surrenders” medical autonomy since not everyone pretends to know better than the experts.
- captainredbeard 5y agoHCPs love the idea of declaring autonomy as outdated, or problematic, or even better, an HCP behavior itself. Dream on.
- giantg2 5y agoSome of us realize it's straight up politics, but we have no power. It's not a choice, but a reality we live with.
- oneepic 5y agoWould have been interesting to hear what the feeling was like 2 weeks later (ie lethargic? walking alright? breathing well?) TFA only says he's alive "with his new heart beating soundly", which could mean a lot of things.
- sdenton4 5y agoI think two weeks after heart surgery is never fun... A few days ago I noted that recovering from having your sternum broken open takes 6-8 weeks to be able to resume daily basic activities under the best circumstances.
- thehappypm 5y agoWhen I was in high school we video chatted with a heart surgeon while he was doing heart surgery. It was an insane, incredible thing to see.
- newaccount74 5y agoTwo weeks after the surgery he probably still has plastic hoses sucking fluid from his thorax and he can maybe sit up with assistance.
- sagarun 5y agoThe doctors want you walking (with help) as soon as possible after a heart transplant, unless something is horribly wrong.
- KineticLensman 5y ago> A few days ago I noted that recovering from having your sternum broken open takes 6-8 Can also confirm. I received CPR which cracked some ribs. I had to sleep in a chair for the first 5 weeks because lying down flat and getting back up again was so painful. Sneezing and coughing were excruciating until I found the trick of 'hugging' oneself just before to reduce chest movement.
- kingsloi 5y ago
- benatkin 5y agoHis victim's family (yes, really) doesn't like that he was the first to get a heart transplant. https://nypost.com/2022/01/13/historic-pig-heart-recipient-was-convicted-in-1988-stabbing/ https://nypost.com/2022/01/13/historic-pig-heart-recipient-w... PETA doesn't like that anyone got a pig heart transplant. https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/first-heart-transplant-from-genetically-altered-pig-peta-statement/ https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/first-heart-transpl...
- giantg2 5y ago"...and a tremendous waste of resources that could be used to fund research that might actually help humans." Hey PETA, source?
- TulliusCicero 5y agoPETA hates anything that makes animals useful to humans. It could solve world peace and they’d be arguing that surely there’s a better way.
- hiptobecubic 5y agoI don't think peta would consider it "world peace" yet.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoWas it not clear I was talking about a hypothetical?
- hiptobecubic 5y agoNo.
- bigyellow 5y agoWhy do animals need to be useful to humans to justify their existence to you?
- taf2 5y agoThis is great news! I am very hopeful there is no reject in a year … hopeful for him and his family
- dmead 5y ago
- wepple 5y agoI assumed “victim” referred to the pig, but I believe this is in reference to the fact that the heart recipient stabbed someone, leading to their death: https://nypost.com/2022/01/13/historic-pig-heart-recipient-was-convicted-in-1988-stabbing/ https://nypost.com/2022/01/13/historic-pig-heart-recipient-w...
- sydthrowaway 5y agoI am not a vegan but this is unethical
- unobatbayar 5y ago
- roberto 5y ago
- unobatbayar 5y agoHow come?
- chana_masala 5y agoMaybe I can add some nuance as a vegan (I'm vegan btw, and I use Arch btw). I think that it's amazing that this is possible, but where it seems unethical to me is that there still are many other ways we could route heart transplants from willing humans. I think the only way I'd find this ethical is if the pig died from natural causes. But that probably complicates using the heart. If a pig is killed for food and then the heart is used for this, it still wouldn't be ethical to me, because it's plainly not ethical to kill another being for one's benefit in a situation that is not purely for survival (everyone's favorite deserted island). A heart transplant is a situation of survival, but again - we should continue to explore human donors first.
- thehappypm 5y agoI disagree. This brings us back to tribal times; kill the animal or starve, or in this case, kill the animal or die of a heart attack.
- chana_masala 5y agoMaybe you could at least address the points I gave instead of plainly ignoring them and repeating the same argument? I already addressed this - we aren't in tribal times. We can even grow organs in the lab. We can also coordinate complex routes to securing organ donations. There are so many available options. And again, if a heart from a pig that died naturally could be found, I'd be all for it. I think it adds a more to control than already a trans species heart, but that'd be my ideal.
- userbinator 5y agoI wonder how long it'll last, given the pig it came out of was probably already an adult, and pigs live far shorter lives than humans.
- jessriedel 5y agoIt's an important question, but the typical donated human organ only lasts ~10 years, which doesn't have much to do with the donor's age. https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/how-long-do-transplanted-organs-last https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/how-long-do-transplanted-... Donors are usually 35-50 at time of donation, so way more than 10 years away from average life expectancy. The donated organs fail for other reasons. There are many examples of donated organs living past 100 (years since donor's birth) even though the number of humans who live that long is quite rare. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3731752/The-woman-100-year-old-kidney-68-year-old-world-s-oldest-transplanted-organ-s-going-strong.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3731752/The-woman... https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200625-the-woman-with-a-100-year-old-liver https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200625-the-woman-with-a...
- exabyte 5y agoDon't get talk about people "feeling" the person from whom they received the transplant inside them? If so, how would a pig seem?
- fooker 5y agoThere is an Indian movie which beautifully explores this concept. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1773764/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1773764/ Worth watching with subtitles if you do not understand the language.
- exabyte 5y agoThat trailer seemed pretty bad
- Chris2048 5y agoPeople talk about a lot of things. God, ghosts, karma. No evidence it isn't anything other than psychological.
- anonymousiam 5y agoThe article says; "Almost 22 years later the first ever xenotransplant has finally taken place." They seem to have forgotten about this baboon-to-human heart transplant from 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Fae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Fae
- kdtop 5y agoYeah, that caught my eye. I did a little research and the first xenotransplant of any kind was somewhere about 1838 -- of a cornea from a pig (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4684730/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4684730/)
- netfl0 5y agoThis is friggin crazy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dqv 5y agoA podcast called Straight Talk MD talks about several different weird transplants like this in this episode: https://pca.st/episode/1628074d-b415-477b-b1f6-81c9d81fc261 https://pca.st/episode/1628074d-b415-477b-b1f6-81c9d81fc261 (For Fame or Money? The Dark Side of Ten Amazing Medical Firsts on Straight Talk MD) Of note is the disastrous synthetic heart in the 90’s. I was surprised that such a thing was attempted.
- wonderwonder 5y agoOptimally the synthetic kidney is more successful https://pharmacy.ucsf.edu/news/2021/09/kidney-project-successfully-tests-prototype-bioartificial-kidney https://pharmacy.ucsf.edu/news/2021/09/kidney-project-succes...
- notjustanymike 5y agoIs it now cannibalism if he eats bacon?
- free-malloc 5y agoThis is why I'm here. Thank you.
- dmead 5y agoI have a cow valve and I say yes. pass me the steak.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lvass 5y agoSpeaking from a country with ongoing human organ harvesting, this is absolutely amazing, everyone involved in this deserves an enormous amount of praise.
- henryw 5y agoThis reminds me of the movie The Island where they cloned people as organ backups https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/.
- Valgrim 5y agoIf you want to explore the concept further, I suggest you watch the movie "Never Let Me Go" (2010). The premise is very similar, apart from the fact there's no secret or conspiracy about it, children are just grown to become sacrificial organ donors, and since it's socially accepted, there's no way out of it. Fair warning: it's pretty depressing.
- bawolff 5y agoDoes the genetic modification mean immunosuppresents aren't required? If so, that sounds like a major step forward.
- goodguyamericun 5y agoI just want to say huge respect for Dr Mohammad who despite his faith decided to do what is right. It might not be well known but most muslims are raised with strong beliefs, even in educated countries (eg 85% in Pakistan support sharia). God bless Dr mohammad
- FDSGSG 5y agoPorcine heart valves are largely accepted by Islamic scholars in situations where there are no alternatives available.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoAbortion is largely accepted by Catholic scholars if there is, otherwise, a high risk of death. That doesn't mean all Catholic medical practitioners would carry out such an operation. I don't think the respect is misplaced.
- bobthechef 5y agoThat is absolutely false and made clear in the Catechism (though abortion is, fundamentally, not a matter of faith, but of ethics, contrary to popular misconception). Abortion understood as the intentional killing of the unborn child, even in the case of high risk of death, is always gravely morally illicit and falls under murder. Even in the given circumstance, it would violate the principle of double effect. Now, what is morally licit is not abortion, but also by virtue of the principle of double effect, a procedure intended to save the mother's life that unintentionally and as a side effect results in the child's death. For example, it is morally licit to extract the affected tissue with the implanted embryo during an ectopic pregnancy. This extraction will result in the death of the child, but the death was neither intended nor was the death of the child the means by which the mother's life was saved nor is saving the life of the mother a lesser good than the life of the child (though in this case, both would very likely have perished if this condition had been allowed to continue). Note that the situation must be proportionally grave, meaning you could not licitly perform such a procedure if the risk to the mother was not proportional (like experiencing headaches because of the pregnancy). In those cases, proportional care is permissible.
- jb1991 5y agoNow I know that I will stop eating pork.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eric4smith 5y agoA good test. The guy is older and wanted to remain alive, despite the wishes of his family. And pigs are so close to humans anyway -- which is why I have the theory of why humans love bacon so much. Best wishes to Mr. Bennett, and hope that whatever happens, it will be a good leap for humanity.
- BreakfastB0b 5y agoHuman Bacon, the final frontier. How long until you can buy Beyond Human burgers?
- geocrasher 5y agoYou may enjoy the first story in the compilation of Clarke stories called The Wind From The Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_from_the_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_from_the_Sun
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y agoBitelabs, a startup purportedly launched to deliver celebrity salami, made that joke in 2014.
- throwanem 5y agoHufu had a product in 2005: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Someone 5y ago> And pigs are so close to humans anyway -- which is why I have the theory of why humans love bacon so much. Are you claiming (most/many) humans are closet cannibals? I don’t agree with that. Also, pigs aren’t particularly close to humans, genetically. In biological classification they even are in a different order (even-hoofed ungulates) than humans, who are primates. ⇒ I don’t think that theory makes sense.
- radu_floricica 5y agoI've said this before here and got downvoted for it, but bioethicists as a profession are responsible for more death than pretty much anything else I can quickly think of. People are dying from heart disease all the time, very often in predictable conditions. Literally millions every year. Statistically this means we should hear about such failed procedures many many more times than we do now - there is literally no downside from doing this much more often, and a strict upside: a chance to live longer and a definite advance in medicine leading to other lives saved. Sure, it may mean more stress for a dying patient, but quite a few would prefer their death have some meaning. But they can't chose this because it's not "ethical". Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there - I'd really like to see an argument where we had three major companies create mRNA vaccines, only one failed (harmlessly!) but we shouldn't have used this technology a few years early. mRNA tech is incredibly versatile - it should have applications from curing cold to curing cancer. But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical". We knew from month 1 that the young and healthy are not hit hard by Covid. Mortality in those groups was always comparable to flu, more or less. But we didn't do challenge trials. We wasted ... I have to take a break from typing, tbh, I'm overwhelmed. We wasted almost a year while literal millions died while wondering if Covid is transmitted by touch, aerosols or airborne when we could have fixed this in two weeks with a bunch of 25 year olds. We spent half a year before even realizing masks help, and we still don't know for sure how much and what's the difference between each kind. We had Omicron - we knew it was different, we had good reason to think it's not significantly worse from the start, but we still had a _lot_ of questions. But two years from the start of the pandemic we STILL didn't put a bunch of healthy volunteers through a completely harmless study to find out things early. Because it wouldn't have been "ethical". This isn't ethics we're talking about. It's pure and unadulterated cowardice. We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for. Joe from the street would be excused from making these decisions, but when you deal with the people directly charged by the society from making these decision, it's just failure to do their job. And in a supermajority of case we're dealing with volunteers anyways. If you feel like reading more about how stupid the whole system is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
- yitchelle 5y agoFor a layman like me on medical matters, it seems very strange that a pig's heart is used. Would it more logical idea to use a primate, our closest "cousin"?
- gavinflud 5y ago"While it is true that pigs are less compatible with humans than monkeys, they can be genetically manipulated to produce organs less likely to be rejected on transplantation. Pigs quickly grow to full size, produce larger litters and can be more easily reared by biotechnology companies." They do cover this point.
- eps 5y agoRead the article.
- Schinken_ 5y agoPigs are not too far off when it comes to the overall body. I believe the idea to use a pig's heart is one off availability (and maybe ethics). A ton of pigs are slaughtered each and every day, we already use several parts of a pig's body (which is a good thing, waste as little as possible). If we can successfully use it's heart for transplantation, even better. This means there is a good supply of hearts to be used.
- ColinWright 5y agoThat's pretty clearly explained in the article.
- dotnet00 5y agoPigs have a lot of physiological similarity to us (thus why fetal pig dissections are often done in high school/undergrad biology). Plus there are fewer ethical concerns around using an animal we already use for food. I imagine there's also a consideration for ease of raising. These pigs had to be kept separate from others and tested frequently for disease because of having some aspects of their immune system weakened to reduce rejection risk. This would probably be easier to do ethically for pigs compared to primates.
- amelius 5y agoDid he become a vegetarian?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nixnax 5y ago
- tester756 5y agoWhat if he had kids now?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MauranKilom 5y agoThey transplanted a heart, not testes.
- threshold 5y agoIs this compassionate use or experimentation on a dying patient for the future benefit of the rest of us? I’m fine with the latter, if consensual. But only if we call it what it is.
- ovi256 5y agoFirst generation transplants are always both. David would have died soon without this (he's quite likely to die soon with it too, unfortunately, if this goes anything like other first of a kind transplant receivers). Desperate people accept desperate measures, and the hope that it may teach us how to save others helps too.
- teekert 5y agoThat is what a clinical trial is. There is now other way. Although with organs-on-a-chip we are working on at least getting the animal testing stages confined to a minimum. Over time we may reduce the risk to first recipients of new tech using these new technologies. Perhaps even digital models may at somepoint start playing a role. But until we have digital models, this is what we have. And it does seem to work well in this case.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoYes. No matter what the treatment might be, someone always has to be the first human it's tried on. Even if we did have good digital simulations, someone would still have to be the first human to get it "for real". That's just the nature of things. Someone has to be the first patient of a new heart surgeon. Someone has to be the first person to hire a newly-minted PE to design a bridge that might fail and kill thousands. And so on. We mitigate these risks to the best of our ability by ensuring rigorous training of doctors and PEs, and stuff like animal testing and computer simulations, but someone still has to be first. It sounds like this patient was well aware of the risks, and opted to get the procedure since otherwise his death would be a certainty.
- dtech 5y agoIt's a way to potentially prolong a terminally ill patients life with an experimental technique, potentially advancing medical science in doing so. I fail to see why this should be cast in a negative light.
- thegabriele 5y agoFrom the article: "[pigs] they can be genetically manipulated to produce organs less likely to be rejected on transplantation." Is this true? How would these manipulations be carried out?
- moffkalast 5y agoDoctor: "Now, most hearts couldn't withstand this voltage ... but I'm fairly certain your heart..." Pig: "What was noise?" Doctor: "The sound of progress, my friend."
- Rallen89 5y agoThis video is a good overview of the whole thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d8svvqX1c0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d8svvqX1c0
- albrewer 5y agoThere's a sugar that most animals produce but humans don't[0]. These pigs have been genetically modified to not produce that sugar, the thought being that that's what's responsible for the xenotransplantation rejections[1]. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html [1] https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20201214/fda-oks-genomic-alteration-of-pigs-for-human-food-possible-medical-uses https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20201214/fda-oks-ge...
- s1artibartfast 5y agoIt is also becoming more common in drug research. It is fairly common to adapt animal genomes to be closer to that of humans so that the drugs will work in similar ways.
- yob22 5y ago