Pig lung transplanted into a human
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
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.
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.
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.
Fortunately determining brain death is a problem with a clear-cut answer with a clear line dividing “brain death” and “not brain death”. Right?
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
If your printer is already severely clogged and that is a major contributor to chronic ink level issues for your printer, apply few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto each of ink drawing ports(do NOT use acetone and/or ethanol; liquid form PFAS is better in narrow technical sense, IIRC). It will dissolve everything unwanted and its positive effects seem to last years, while being effectively harmless to electro-mechanical systems.
They are extensively used in pharmacological research because they match real organs very well on the cellular level. But there is further research necessary to implement the large scale parts. E.g. in kidneys the actual kidney and the connection to the gall bladder forms separately and is then combined into an organ. That doesn't work, yet.
And in some cases nobody has the courage to actually use it. The list of reasons why a liver organoid couldn't be implanted into a live patient is growing very thin. Well, aside from funding (which is massive if it fails, at least the equivalent of a year's pay. 3 or 4 times a year's pay for a doctoral student).
I would like to point out that this research isn't especially badly treated. It has fared better than most programs. But it probably can't even be saved. The actual defunding happened 5 years ago and last year even the PI has moved on, and every doctoral student involved also has. I'm sure they'll answer questions on the subject if you ask, but you'll have to rebuild things from papers and email questions. There is a spinoff selling organoids to pharma, but tiny ones (think clusters of x0000 cells). If the research in scaling organoids to full sizes is restarted now, you can't really expect results the first year, maybe two at least.
It isn't just the US that is defunding science.
China is doing amazing work.
Of course it failed, but it's one step in a long journey.
Red tape aplenty.
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.
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.
[1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8.
are you therefore required to answer the phone, because who else would be calling on shabat?
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?
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.
Another time he asked my friend to tear him some toilet paper
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?
I’m not Jewish but it’s easy to see similar mental gymnastics on myself or around. Remarking it on others before myself would show a great lack of introspection. When someone is surprised, the wise thinking is to question his own beliefs before the object of his discovery.
There's a lot of crossover between Judaism and DnD player mentality. You're very much encouraged to learn the source material, the commentary and to discuss and debate it. Workarounds don't actually break the rules; and you need to put a lot of study into doing them properly.
Sometimes you need to take a sensible decision and choose to just flat out break the rules. In those situations one is encouraged to do so in an uncommon or abnormal way so it doesn't become habitual. This makes sense to me - I didn't smoke inside for the first 3 years of moving into my house, but the first time I did break that rule it made breaking it much easier the second, third, or subsequent times.
In your example given I can see a situation that isn't actually a risk to life (which comes under different rulings), but is still serious enough you need to take some action before waiting for Shabbat to end. A burst pipe would be a good example; it's not going to kill anyone but it could cause extremely serious damage if left. Asking for help rather than just picking the phone up and treating it like a regular day sorta makes logical sense in that context, though it's probably not what I'd choose to do.
Jewish laws only ever apply to Jews [1]; they have no expectation, want or desire for it to apply to anyone else, through conversion or otherwise. If your friend isn't Jewish then he's welcome to do what he wants. There is no damnation in the Christian sense for anyone, Jewish or otherwise. It's also possible to get into Jewish heaven without being Jewish, but you do have to obey a small subset [1] of the laws.
The current Israeli administration is governed by hard line Jewish leaders and don’t seem to abide by pikachu at all.
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”).
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.
Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease. There are also risks, including the risks of surgery. After the transplant, you will need to take anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, for as long as your new kidney is working, which can have side effects. You will have a higher risk for infections and certain types of cancer.
Although most transplants are successful and last for many years, how long they last can vary from one person to the next. Depending on your age, many people will need more than one kidney transplant during a lifetime.
https://www.kidney.org/kidney-topics/kidney-transplant
The majority of kidney patients with end-stage kidney disease do not simply die: they can survive several years on dialysis. As far as I can tell, most indeed do: only a minority of kidney patients ever get transplants.
Source: relative with kidney disease who would not accept a living donour kidney because of ethical concerns.
The US has a problem where there are a bunch of outfits whose income is derived specifically from dialysis, so for them transplants are bad business. Sure, the patient will (statistically) have a longer life and enjoy higher quality of life, but their income will be reduced so...
This results in a rather... muted endorsement of qualitatively better outcomes and where there's obviously also going to be an ethical component I'd say that's undesirable.
We all die. People with kidney disease die significantly sooner statistically if they do not receive a transplant, so this is the sense in which I mean saving a life.
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
And note that while dialysis is big business and I have no doubt that the people who are in it care far more about their profits than their patients, so are transplants. In fact transplants cost a lot more and make people a lot more money than dialysis and the only reason they're not as big business as dialysis is that there's just not enough donours, which makes a big honking red financial incentive to keep pushing for everyone to become a donour.
Meanwhile, like the National Kidney Foundation says, in my quote above, 'Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease' and neither does dialysis. And because both treatments keep patients alive for longer than the typical five-year horizon of medical follow-up studies, they, both together, reduce the incentive to work on real "cures" of kidney disease (which, like cancer, is not one condition but many) which would make the sucking of dialysis and transplant both things of the past.
And I know this last one because I personally asked my relative's nephrologist and transplant surgeon about it and they were vague and hand-wavy, like "oh, sure, there's people working on that sort of thing somewhere".
But nobody's really trying because we can make millions keeping people tied up to machines or on immunosuppression until they give up the spirit and so who cares?
Nobody talks like this. It is understood that humans are mortal.
Yes, necessarily kidney disease cure research gets you fewer QALYs than figuring out a way to cure something we have no treatment for. But given we haven't eradicated polio it's not as though humans are very good at this whole cost-benefit analysis when it comes to medicine.
"Oh I didn't actually save the little old ladies when their nursing home burned down. I just made their life a bit easier for a little while, they still all died because they were human"
Is not analogous to this:
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
It’s not a stretch