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Comment by htor | Hacker News Reader

grow human organs inside rats and? how does that work? i don't understand. meanwhile we are entering the sixt mass extinction event caused by a massive climate change. what good is this technology when you have failing crops, extreme weather, no electricity and mass immigration at your doorstep?

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Presumably, the eventual goal is to grow full-sized organs inside some larger animal. Then the organ can be harvested and transplanted to a human who needs it. Per my understanding, medicine does a lot of work with rats because they're cheap and easy to work with, so any new technology of this type would be tried on rats first.

By the way, my neutral explanation above doesn't mean that I approve of doing such things. Honestly, I'm quite torn about the issue.

I'm not remotely torn about it, taken to the finish, it's a human organ with my dna grown in a pig and then transplanted into me.

We already eat bacon and use large mammal heart valves in surgery.

I mean we wear the skin of cows, grease things with their rendered fat and use them for glue.

This seems like a strange point to be torn on.

Remember that a bio ethicist has years of education on smart ways to block stuff like this.

If they didn’t block this stuff they wouldn’t have a job.

Well, "we" don't all eat bacon and wear the skin of cows. What's strange about wanting to respect other living beings and avoid harming them? This is also not incompatible with the belief that a human life should come first, e.g. in your heart valve example.

I quite enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of the PETA director being a Type 1 Diabetic.

https://www.humanewatch.org/person/mary_beth_sweetland/

Hopefully the use of animals for tissue incubation and harvesting is a bridge to a future when animals are no longer required for human tissue synthesis.

Artificial womb experiments are going well [1], as well as tissue synthesis for cultured meat (which is just animal muscle), so...maybe?

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-...

Reminds me of the Bene Tleilax and their Axlotl tanks - presumed to be advanced technology but in reality female humans.

> when animals are no longer required

maybe an impossible burger?

I don't know about Japan, but in the US rats are also often used because they're basically the biggest mammal that has almost no regulation on what you do to them. Experimenting on, for example, a monkey might be closer to something human, but they're not legally classified as pests, so doing things with them requires a lot more paperwork and might not be approved.

Definitely not saying it shouldn't be that way; I'm kind of glad that we have some level of ethical rules for handling animals.

You're missing one of the other huge factors in why mice and rats are used for experiments: lifetime. These animals (esp. mice) have very, very short lifetimes by human standards, so you don't have to wait around for decades to see how something affects the animal over its whole lifespan. This is especially useful for aging research: it doesn't take very long for mice to become "elderly", so you can test out anti-aging experiments on them. Doing this on humans, even if it were totally legal, would be very slow because it'll take you 70+ years to grow a human in a lab to old age. Mice can only live a few years at most.

Yeah, and unlike something like a fruit fly, which also has a short lifespan, mice are mammals, so they are still fairly close to us in the animal kingdom, relatively speaking.

This is a really basic appeal to worse problems fallacy. You also assume that the same resources used for this somehow take away from addressing climate change.

For human organs the most likely host species is pig.

Pigs are big enough and apparently quite similar to us. And also the slaughter of hundreds of millions of them every year is already well accepted...

...and for something far less exalted than curing people of diabetes.

Well exactly. If we are fine breeding so many for meat, breeding a few more to cure serious illnesses or even to save lives should not raise problems in public opinion.

Perhaps even further than that! It may make humanity realize that, just as oil is too valuable to burn, pigs are too valuable to use for bacon instead of life saving medical treatments.

Well, if you have to slaughter the pig to remove its human pancreas for transplant anyway, the ethical thing to do is extract as much value as you can by also using its delicious, delicious meat. (Which hopefully does not contain too many migrated human cells.)

This, but honestly I think to avoid any chance of something like prions we should just avoid genetically altered pigs for edible consumption altogether and stick to naturally bred pigs.

Yeah dog owners are on a real meat kick now so the meat will still have an important use. Dogs don't mind eating something that's 1% (or any other percentage, really) human.

That’s getting close to cannabalism. Especially if some Human cells start circulating around its bloodstream.

There isn't a meaning limit on the number of pigs that can be raised, unfortunately.

I hope you're right.

Nothing is too valuable for bacon.

> And also the slaughter of hundreds of millions of them every year is already well accepted...

I hope this changes eventually. It is one of humans archaic traditions that is highly unethical.

it's fairly complicated but basically that's the magic of induced pluripotent stem cells. It's possible to turn human cells into cells that are prepared to become a specific organ, and then place them in an environment in which they will grow to that organ. This is because most of the necessary commands to differentiate and multiply cells into an organ are encoded in the genome and cellular state.

I think the wikipedia page helps understand this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell although the part where you can actually make a rat/human hybrid is still undefined science.

[This is because most of the necessary commands to differentiate and multiply cells into an organ are encoded in the genome and cellular state.]

The current mass extinction event we're currently in has little to do with climate change, but a lot more to do with habitat destruction from industrial activities, pollution, deforestation, etc.

Humans love to blame problems on amorphous "others" in some other location, rather than the people right here who are acting selfishly right here.

yes, i forgot to add "anthropogenic" to climate change. ie – this climate change is the direct result of human activity

Is there this false notion floating out there somewhere that "science" is a universal resource and paying "science" to one thing inhibits our ability to understand another thing?

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