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Comment by sonicggg | Hacker News Reader

Choosing a guy next to his deathbed is not the greatest PR move. People will associate the death to the transplant.

Choosing someone not next to their deathbed is very likely something that would never get approved by an ethics board.

I do wonder, however, if there were potential patients available, who were near death solely due to the need for a heart transplant (and were near-certain not to get a conventional human transplant in time), and not also because of a host of other issues.

Given the complexities of the human body and how central strong circulation is to them, "Near death from heart failure, ineligible or outside the window for another transplant, but lacking any life-threatening non-cardiac comorbidities" is going to be a tough find.

I’m glad this team was more concerned about science and minimizing risk than PR. Hopefully negative press doesn’t cause much of a hinderance.

Not sure about that aspect either. They invested a boatload of money into a guy that can't even make a 1-year follow-up. How are they supposed to observe the transplant long term?

Why are you so concerned about being able to observe it long-term when prior to this it had never even been able to be observed short term?

Do you think they should be doing this on a bunch of healthy people to "learn more"? Like you think there will be volunteers?

Or do you think it's simply impossible and shouldn't have been done at all?

Or are you just being contrary to be contrary?

Healthy people? Well, it's not like it's "raining organs" for people on a waiting list. Many of them will die waiting. There must be someone on a slight better shape and willing to take a chance.

It may not be ethical to do this under the guise of administering medical practice even if there is informed consent. Part of a doctors duty is to be the rational actor to say “you could have 6 months to live and this procedure has no evidence that you’ll live any longer, in fact, it could shorten your life to the time of your surgery”.

This is advocating for civil engineers to willingly approve on a bridge they have no evidence won’t collapse, just because the current bridge needs serious replacement.

Define "slightly better shape". Because that's now your inclusion criteria. You have to be sick enough that "Or this might not work and kill you" seems like an acceptable risk, but not as sick as the guy they chose by arbitrary and hidden metrics primarily based on looking at the outcome retrospectively.

How is this negative press? This transplant was a huge success.

It is bad press for people who only read (or understand) headlines.

The man with the pig heart died. Sounds bad. Pig heart not good.

Swipe.

Next newsflash.

People needing an organ less urgently are going to be unlikely to take a huge risk on something unproven. People needing an organ urgently but with fewer red flags otherwise would similarly likely prefer the human organ they could get over the experimental one.

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