Pig lung transplanted into a human

TL;DR: NO, you won't be getting a pig lung anytime soon.

>However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant.

Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment.

The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients.

Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course.

If I need a lung, I don't want a frickin' oinker lung. I want a lung 3D printed from my own cloned tissue that can slot right in without my body's own Apple part-integrity pairing mechanism kicking in and trying to yeet it out.

Seinfield had an episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALpcxliWLeI

I'd take it over dying. (Not that this technology is actually at a stage where it could prevent that, but neither are whole 3D printed lungs.)

First heart transplant lived for 18 days post-op, it has to start somewhere.

Would it be considered haram even if you don't actually eat it?

The danger of xeonozoonsis outweighs the benefits of cross species organ transplants for humans

I’d love a hard sci-fi story where they implant chunks of pig brain into brain damaged humans, trying to maintain as much “life context” but bringing in new brain matter to help them function again.

Then you’ll need to wait

> He has only forbidden you ˹to eat˺ carrion, blood, swine[1], and what is slaughtered in the name of any other than Allah. But if someone is compelled by necessity—neither driven by desire nor exceeding immediate need—they will not be sinful. Surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

[1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8.

https://quran.com/2?startingVerse=173

On the Jewish side of things there's a principle called "Pikuach Nefesh" which essentially means that outside of extremes like murder, rape, and other violent crimes against others, you should do anything possible to preserve life. If you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath and help.

I can't imagine the red tape this research would have had to deal with in America.

China is doing amazing work.

Of course it failed, but it's one step in a long journey.

Good question. No, because there is a fiqh (jurisprudence) rule that roughly states “necessities permit the prohibited”, which can be used to override the impurity of pigs.

In addition, some scholars (a minority) argue that perhaps one reason behind pork consumption being forbidden is due to its utility in human transplantation (thereby making it “sacred”).

>if you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath

are you therefore required to answer the phone, because who else would be calling on shabat?

Why not all vegan then

3d printing is not the approach that will yield organs. My money is on the work Michael Levin is doing on bioelectronics, where you essentially “command” (/convince) cells to turn into the organ you need by talking with them in cellular electronic language.

I was thinking, big deal, didn't they do a pig heart transplant back in 1999? Turns out that was a popular children's novel and TV series in the UK called "Pig Heart Boy", not reality. First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.

They had four different assessments and written permission from family plus a braindead patient.

Red tape aplenty.

I think our neurons are actually different in significant ways, might be more accurate and interesting for them to use brain organoids.

Star Trek went into this a bit. There was an episode in which the technology behind the android Data's artificial brain had been turned into a medical treatment used to prolong the life of a recurring character who got injured, and the ethical question of the subplot was roughly "how much of their brain can you subsitute with functional but essentially generic hardware before they cease to be themselves, making the rescue attempt fruitless".

Most people will probably not remember this - it was the death of Kira's lover Bareil on DS9 - because it was almost throwaway, but it was one of those sparkling little ideas and questions Star Trek used to be filled with that has stayed with me life-long.

Because the exception is for saving identifiable, individual human lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh

That alone is insane, incredible. Hardly measures up to the ideal of leaving the hospital, good as new, but putting that aside: 18 days on a transplant, trans-species organ? I'm in awe!

My mind-reading senses tell me parent might be thinking about the scaffolding approach where you show cells the vague outlines of a lung or heart in the form of an extracellular matrix and then they go "hmm, we are building a heart then".

My brain autocorrected that to Pikachu and I had a moment of perplexment.

Perhaps you then consider donating your kidney?

Dead in less than a year.

9 days is definitely less than a year

How?

If I remember correctly you need both. Program the cells to be X organ cells, and provide a scaffold for them to grow on.

It was tried earlier by Religa in 1987, but the experiment was a failure AFAIK.

Ha this blew my mind, I was sure that this was real

odd comment, the US is at the forefront of pig organ transplants?

that seems like a way harder problem than convincing your body not to kill the pig organ

Not exactly what you asked for, but Alastair Reynolds have books with "hyperpigs" that are part-pig, part-human, likely bred to be replacement parts for humans.

Well yeah, but it's plausible that this is easier to get working. If we can get animal organs working, then we can save lives while we figure out how to print/clone human organs.

This is about lungs?

There was no life saving here. This was performed in a brain dead person simply to determine the science outcomes.

The brain dead person was used as a living experiment, and they were watching for immunological response.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have never read of this happening in the US. There's far too much red tape.

Pathogens will infect cross species via these organ implants.

Yes, I am an organ donor like many others. There are also other paths that doesn’t give pathogens opportunities to infect cross species

Porkin' Across America was prophetic

18 days is how long the first human-to-human heart transplant recipient lived post-op. The more recent first pig heart recipient made it two months.

You need to update your priors or assign less confidence to them. A pig heart transplant was completed (successfully) in the US a few years ago: https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2022/university-of-...

You're not reading my comment. Go back and read it again.

My entire point is that China is experimenting on BRAIN DEAD living bodies as test tubes.

This is a way to accelerate much faster since there are far more brain dead patients and no effort needs to be made to keep the patient alive.

They're effectively using these bodies as lab experiments. It's an incredibly smart move by China.

Without the red tape and with an endless stream of brain dead bodies, they're going to leapfrog America quickly with this technology.

This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel.

I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.

Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.

> First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.

That patient died shortly thereafter. The condition is critical and there's a lot of immunological pressure put on the patient.

China is smart to study this in living cadavers first. It's much easier to find patients that aren't already on death's door, and there is no need to keep the patient alive. You can run experiment after experiment.

no, but if you have a pager, you would.

you’re wrong, but i won’t dispute the central notion that the regulatory environment is tougher in the US https://sciencemediacentre.es/en/reactions-kidney-transplant...

A friend of mine lives in Montreal where there is a large orthodox Jewish population and he told me he was out walking one day and a woman started calling to him from the door of her house and gesturing for him to come over. She explained to him that she needed his help: there was an urgent situation and she needed to make a phone call, but because it was the Sabbath, she was not able to. He made the call for her and went on his way.

I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?

It is easier to agree to donate your lungs because ethically they're only going to take your lungs if you die. So then you don't care anyway. If you agree to donate a kidney they may ask when you're alive, because you have two kidneys and you can survive (though with some reduction in capability) with just one. This is called Living Kidney Donation, you don't have to offer to do this, and even if you offer, and it's a match you don't have to go through with the donation but obviously there are huge psychological impacts from deciding to perhaps save somebody's life as a conscious choice at a non-negligible risk to your own.

And keep in mind people who get these organs are very very ill

I'm almost afraid to ask, what are living cadavers?

Presumably people who are on the verge of death and beyond any kind of proven treatments. They're technically alive but have a very short predicted lifespan.

You can try a novel treatment on those but at the same time are limited by ethical concerns regarding pain and future survival (if the transplant "works", you are now in a tricky situation, as you can't easily do anything that has the potential to make the situation worse... and given it's uncharted territory, anything has the potential to make it worse).

Brain-dead people don't have such limitations. You don't have to worry about causing pain nor shortening potential survival, so you can try things that are likely to "kill" them (cause the transplant to fail, or other issues) and learn from the outcomes.

How strongly is this principal followed?

The current Israeli administration is governed by hard line Jewish leaders and don’t seem to abide by pikachu at all.

How recently were the arguments around utility in human transplantation put forward? Are religious scholars the OG biotech founders?

Good paper on the history of human/animal transplantation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3246856/

In the 1920s, Voronoff advocated the transplantation of slices of chimpanzee testis into aged men whose “zest for life” was deteriorating, believing that the hormones produced by the testis would rejuvenate his patients.

There’s a lot of work going on to try and modify the DNA of the pigs to make them “transplant-compatible” using CRISPR, avoiding rejection and lifelong medication for the patient etc;

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan4187

Brain death without cardiac death.

> Brain-dead people don't have such limitations. You don't have to worry about causing pain

Fortunately determining brain death is a problem with a clear-cut answer with a clear line dividing “brain death” and “not brain death”. Right?

Very good point - I don't have an answer for that. But I'd say if there was a choice between killing a person who is very much alive and conscious by our current standards, and one who is "brain dead" by the same standards, I'd still pick the latter.

Part of it is a choice you make when choosing to donate your body for research. There's a chance brain death can be determined incorrectly (though in this situation it's likely the same determination will be used to withdraw life-support, research donation or not).

If you really needed a lung you would take what you could get.

That's easy to say if you don't need an organ. And the dangers are mostly theoretical at this point.

I've been reading his novels, and I like the story of the pigs.

Genetically tweaked to be more compatible with the humans that might harvest their organs, but then they became a bit too human. Then scientists were like fuck it how far can we go with this. Hyperpigs.

Scorpio is not as interesting a character as I would like, but he's a good pig.

Generalizing a lot here, but Jews and Christians interpret ambiguities within scripture very differently. Most Christians will try to maintain the spirit of the rule. Jews often view ambiguities as loopholes intentionally left by God. If the loophole wasn't mean to be there, God would have written it differently.

For a great example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv . Look carefully and you'll see these in Jewish areas of NYC like Williamsburg.

It wasn't the entire heart but people have had things like valves transplanted from animals. Kevin Rudd had a bovine aortic valve transplanted back in 2011.

This is what holds us back.

If I'm ever declared brain dead, I want scientists experimenting on me. That's a much better use than giving organs to just a handful of people. It pushes the salients forward for everyone.

What happened to the 3d printed organs I was promised a decade ago?

There are a few docked cruise ships run as hotels, where they're so docked it would be hard to undock, but not run aground.

Had an orthodox roommate in college who once asked me to light his bowl for him...

Another time he asked my friend to tear him some toilet paper

> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules?

Apparently, the consensus is that the God does not just approve of working around the rules, but actively _expects_ it. Otherwise the rules wouldn't have these loopholes, would they?

A great take on the Ship of Theseus.

That series messed me up when I was younger.

No, but you can measure pain response, and predict pretty well if they ever wake up, so well enough for this.