Pig lung transplanted into a human

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

Actually it’s less the science of it that concerns me, but whether procedures will be rigorously followed.

And in China they can just decide they will never wake up regardless.

Not that shortly, the patient lived about two months.

Agree with you on that. People can say that there is a procedure, but verifying that they are following it is another matter. Also curious as to the process for volunteering people for such experiments. Like if there is some paperwork that the family signs off on.

I mean for experimental organ transplants we could literally do both though.