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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

We deny people waiting for organ transplants medical treatment regularly. there simply aren't enough organs to go around. In the case that people are already having life saving organs withheld from them, it makes sense to prioritize.

I think people have the ethical issue in this case backwards: the reason this guy got this transplant is because it was an experiment. We effectively used an ex-con as a guinea pig. (Personally, I'm fine with that, he was fully aware and consented, it was his only chance.)

If this guy had died due to the experimental heart failing, we'd probably be seeing a bunch of op-eds about our moral failure to prevent exploitation of a vulnerable (ex-)prison population.

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> We deny people waiting for organ transplants medical treatment regularly. there simply aren't enough organs to go around.

Yeah. There is no shortage of pig organs which is kinda the whole point. Rationing limited care is different than denying perfectly available care simply out of retribution. I thought the context made that distinction rather self-evident.

There is definitely a shortage of transplantable pig hearts. This is the first such heart ever.

There is shortage yes in the sense that the heart didn’t come from just any pig. It is a specific, modified breed which made the procedure more likely to succeed. The donor pig was also probably raised in more sanitary conditions than most other pig would be.

There is not a huge supply of these transplantable pig hearts at the moment. But if the procedure proves to be viable and the long term consequences make it favourable we can scale up transplantable pig heart production.

The reason we are not transplanting pig hearts to thousands of patients right now is not because of any such supposed shortage though, but because the procedure is not proven yet. The experiment in question is set out to provide data to help answer that question.

Yeah, I don't think we disagree about anything real.

> If this guy had died due to the experimental heart failing, we'd probably be seeing a bunch of op-eds about our moral failure to prevent exploitation of a vulnerable (ex-)prison population.

On the contrary, you’re probably massively overestimating how much the society at large cares for convicted felons.

The sad reality is it’s not a lot.

Which is why I doubt we’d see a single op-ed about it.

> We deny people waiting for organ transplants medical treatment regularly.

Yes, but not for their moral failings. We deny care for health reasons, as generally speaking the goal is to optimize for additional healthy years of life.

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