6 ms·
“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out
by Waterluvian 1y ago
“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal.
It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with.
But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead.
It’s quite something to stop and think about how the problem is becoming less and less about “how do we do the science and the engineering?” And more about “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?”
- signa11 1y agofwiw, biological heart valves, as opposed to metallic valves, are already quite commonly used today. biological ones are typically made from either cows, or pigs (bovine, porcine respectively). but this is on another level altogether.
- philiplu 1y agoI had heart surgery 2 months ago to repair my mitral valve. In the lead-up to that, I had to make a decision what to do if it turned out replacement was needed instead of repair. Choices were metallic valves requiring me to be on warfarin the rest of my life or pig-derived valves. I chose the latter, mostly to avoid warfarin for life, but also because my surgeon was a PhD for work on creating biological-derived valves that didn’t trigger the immune system. Just mind-blowing what can be done. But I’m glad repair and not replacement worked out - and I now have GoreTex fibers attached to my valve.
- ACCount37 1y agoGoreTex being the brand of a material that was put into your heart sure sounds amusing.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoAt heart, he's a GoreTex™ guy. I'll just get my coat...
- philiplu 1y agoI’ll have to remember that one
- ggm 1y ago> I'll just get my coat And what fabric is that coat made of?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoSheepskin (the “I’ll get my coat” reference is from The Register).
- mkl 1y agohttps://theregister.com https://theregister.com? It's much older than that.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI am not surprised, but that's where I learned it.
- wombatpm 1y agoPig and cow valves will calcify and fail eventually. But it’s a slow process so you have time to plan and make decisions for replacement. Mechanical values are great until one day the clicking sound stops and you need to get to a hospital ASAP. Back in the 90’s there were a series of values where the flipping plate shattered-sending shrapnel into the heart and beyond. Typical failure mode is stuck open which is survivable. Stuck closed is very bad.
- 0x1ceb00da 1y agoBut why cows and pigs and not chimps?
- padjo 1y agoPresumably because we already farm pigs and cows so there’s a supply chain and the ethics are ok in most people’s heads.
- signa11 1y agomost likely because their (heart) valve anatomy is similar to humans ? this is just a guess btw.
- thyristan 1y agoSize. Pig hearts are the same size as human hearts, cow hearts are larger, so easier to cut up for parts. Chimp hearts are usually smaller. Also, the risk of transmitting zoonosis is larger in primates than in other mammals, because with humans being primates as well, more viruses/prions/fungi might be infectious to both.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 1y agoMeanwhile we can’t figure out how to provide a basic level of housing and healthcare to everyone.
- badpun 1y agoThe US can't, but humanity as a whole can. Finland has both, for example.
- onraglanroad 1y agoThose things have been figured out, you're just choosing not to implement them (you generally, not you specifically).
- ekianjo 1y agoProvide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of debt
- nolroz 1y agoActually tax the rich?
- dmitrygr 1y agoInsane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of under $2000. And what then?
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoSpend the money on things of actual value rather than distributing it equally among a group of people who will inevitably just spend it on an iPhone?
- paulcole 1y agoYou can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once. It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
- ofalkaed 1y agoI think Alan Kay deserves the credit for the tablet. We have vague allusions to tablet like things before Kay but it was Kay who really came up with concept.
- lloeki 1y agoDoes he? It seems to be mostly keyboard operated, and references to any stylus interaction seem to be retconed, let alone direct touch ones. My search only finds modern claims that he's the true tablet inventor and tablets are touch this and stylus that, but these poison results about any possible original reference of that interaction model having been conceived at the time.
- iberator 1y agoWhat tablet are you talking about?!
- varispeed 1y ago> “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?” Progress, invention, is part of being human, so this is natural and normal thing that these thing happen. You can stop, marvel, and then go improve upon your own niche.
- ACCount37 1y agoEh, "figuring out how to deal with it" is the easy part. The hard part is first making it work, and then proving its effectiveness, scaling it and improving it. Medical advancements in particular are notorious for having a hideously long lead time. This here is an experimental procedure that, if all goes well, will only start becoming commonplace by year 2035. It's not guaranteed to all go well. You'd think there would be a massive push for new medical technologies that have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and you'd be wrong. Healthcare is where innovation goes to die. Most companies that attempt to develop this kind of bleeding edge treatment crash and burn either before or shortly after seeing the first results. Just the cost of early testing of a new treatment option is enough to bankrupt many.
- webnrrd2k 1y agoRe: “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?” part of your post... I think that came to prominence when cheap, effective birth control became available. I think it was about the first time that the common people could decide to make major alterations in how their bodies function. That debate continue in the current fight about trans rights. As science and medicine progress, what was once considered solely god-given, or exclusively biologically determined, will be for people to decide for themselves, the decision made between them and their doctors.
- firesteelrain 1y agoNext is Old Man’s War style bodies
- pazimzadeh 1y agoIt really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most successful organs for transplantation, even in allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that they are working well in xeno as well. Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot. Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them work. My mom worked with eGenesis on pig xenotransplantation, particularly lung. Here are some links if you'd like to donate to the International Xenotransplantation Association: https://donate.tts.org/agnes/ https://donate.tts.org/agnes/ https://tts.org/74-ixa/889-ixa-in-memoriam-agnes-marie-azimzadeh https://tts.org/74-ixa/889-ixa-in-memoriam-agnes-marie-azimz...
- derektank 1y agoThere have already been a couple of attempted heart xenotransplants? Lawrence Faucette being the most recent patient that I've read about.
- pazimzadeh 1y agoyep, but they didn't last as long. six weeks max I think?
- magicalhippo 1y agoA family member needed a kidney transplant in the early 60s. This was in the UK where the first successful transplant was in 1959, so just a few years earlier. Thanks to a kid on a motorcycle she got a kidney just in the nick of time. She was in her early 20s and was told she could expect a few years. Because of that she never had kids. Her donated kidney served her well and she lived a quite normal life. She passed when it finally gave up when she was close to 70. So those "few years" turned into almost 50. Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course. She always wondered if that was the reason it held out so long.
- isatty 1y ago
- tw04 1y agoAnd yet while (legitimate) science can universally agree continuing to burn fossil fuels will cause unimaginable chaos for planet earth, half the planet doesn't seem to care about the impending collapse. So while in my personal vacuum this is awesome, when I stop to consider the situation for 30 seconds I can only think: huh, we might have been able to find a new cure for humanity that isn't going to matter when having "a profession" (like doctor) is no longer relevant to our inevitable hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
- ipaddr 1y agoLegitimate science doesn't concluded unimaginable chaos from continuing to burn fossil fuels that's what influencers or movies or tiktok reels present because they are part of the attention economy where scaring you is profitable. Besides hunter/gatherers need medicine men who understand the old ways.
- Manuel_D 1y agoMost experts don't predict the collapse of industrialized society. Higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and more energetic weather events will cause damage and make life difficult for decent chunks of the population especially those in less developed areas that are both hotter and more poorly equipped to cope with climate change. But I'm not aware of a consensus or even a plurality among climate scientists that industrialized society is going to collapse even in the more pessimistic predictions. I'm not sure how Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the company building these pig kidneys is located, becomes a hunter-gatherer society on account of climate change.
- jondiggsit 1y agoAnd people skiing down Mt. Everest. I always like to think about progress and our current reality in comparison to Star Trek….
- BrtByte 1y agoWe're deep into the part of the sci-fi timeline where the tech works, and now the real challenge is cultural, ethical, and existential
- amelius 1y agoWe've invented social media, but democracy wasn't ready for it.
- globular-toast 1y ago> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. If this is Star Trek then I suppose it's a good example of "be careful what you wish for"...
- latexr 1y ago> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoPeople keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThe states were listening to people through their TVs in the 1940s?
- ants_everywhere 1y agoThey were listening to people through their wall art. Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0]. The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time. At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is. [0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoNot "just", the inspiration came from many angles: Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, Spanish repression of POUM, Wartime Britain (where the shape of the TVs come from) and multiple other dystopian novels. People seems to forget that Orwell was a anti-Stalinist socialist.
- worldsavior 1y agoSci-Fi movies aren't that far from reality. It was just a matter of time.
- justinclift 1y agoSeems like we'd want to be careful about the one(s) we're picking though. Sci-Fi movies don't tend to be all happy, happy, fun and joy for everyone in them. o_O
- worldsavior 1y agoUnfortunately not everyone is careful.
- notmyjob 1y agoThe “pigmen” as you insensitively refer to them aren’t necessarily seniors. Organ failure affects men of all ages and the patients themselves are not to blame, often they have terrible support structures surrounding them and other factors beyond their control. You can be optimistic and compassionate simultaneously.
- dreamcompiler 1y ago> “Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal Replacing human heart valves with pig valves has been a thing at least as far back as the 1970s with decade-ish survival rates. Granted TFA is about a whole organ -- not just a piece of tissue -- but xenotransplantation per se is not new.