[HN Gopher] Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant
___________________________________________________________________
Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant
Author : signa11
Score : 501 points
Date : 2025-09-25 09:20 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| "Xenotransplantation" is pretty #%^*ing metal.
|
| It's pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the
| species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist
| with.
|
| But also... we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have
| the ship's computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the
| holodeck. And we're making pigmen senior citizens who would
| otherwise be dead.
|
| It's quite something to stop and think about how the problem is
| becoming less and less about "how do we do the science and the
| engineering?" And more about "how do we handle how this changes
| what it is like to be human today?"
| signa11 wrote:
| fwiw, biological heart valves, as opposed to metallic valves,
| are already quite commonly used today.
|
| biological ones are typically made from either cows, or pigs
| (bovine, porcine respectively).
|
| but this is on another level altogether.
| philiplu wrote:
| I had heart surgery 2 months ago to repair my mitral valve.
| In the lead-up to that, I had to make a decision what to do
| if it turned out replacement was needed instead of repair.
| Choices were metallic valves requiring me to be on warfarin
| the rest of my life or pig-derived valves. I chose the
| latter, mostly to avoid warfarin for life, but also because
| my surgeon was a PhD for work on creating biological-derived
| valves that didn't trigger the immune system. Just mind-
| blowing what can be done. But I'm glad repair and not
| replacement worked out - and I now have GoreTex fibers
| attached to my valve.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| GoreTex being the brand of a material that was put into
| your heart sure sounds amusing.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| At heart, he's a GoreTex(tm) guy.
|
| I'll just get my coat...
| philiplu wrote:
| I'll have to remember that one
| ggm wrote:
| > _I 'll just get my coat_
|
| And what fabric is that coat made of?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sheepskin (the "I'll get my coat" reference is from _The
| Register_ ).
| mkl wrote:
| https://theregister.com? It's much older than that.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I am not surprised, but that's where I learned it.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Pig and cow valves will calcify and fail eventually. But
| it's a slow process so you have time to plan and make
| decisions for replacement. Mechanical values are great
| until one day the clicking sound stops and you need to get
| to a hospital ASAP.
|
| Back in the 90's there were a series of values where the
| flipping plate shattered-sending shrapnel into the heart
| and beyond. Typical failure mode is stuck open which is
| survivable. Stuck closed is very bad.
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| But why cows and pigs and not chimps?
| padjo wrote:
| Presumably because we already farm pigs and cows so there's
| a supply chain and the ethics are ok in most people's
| heads.
| signa11 wrote:
| most likely because their (heart) valve anatomy is similar
| to humans ? this is just a guess btw.
| thyristan wrote:
| Size. Pig hearts are the same size as human hearts, cow
| hearts are larger, so easier to cut up for parts. Chimp
| hearts are usually smaller.
|
| Also, the risk of transmitting zoonosis is larger in
| primates than in other mammals, because with humans being
| primates as well, more viruses/prions/fungi might be
| infectious to both.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Meanwhile we can't figure out how to provide a basic level of
| housing and healthcare to everyone.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Provide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of
| debt
| nolroz wrote:
| Actually tax the rich?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Insane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from
| all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread
| it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of
| under $2000. And what then?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Spend the money on things of actual value rather than
| distributing it equally among a group of people who will
| inevitably just spend it on an iPhone?
| paulcole wrote:
| You can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once.
|
| It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots
| of money every year. Why don't we just take a bit more of
| it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
| missedthecue wrote:
| We're capable of taking the money but not of investing it
| into useful projects. Inherent system flaw.
| Skgqie1 wrote:
| Billionaires generally do not have a knaxj for value
| creation. What they do generally have is an egregious
| amount of greed and a total lack of empathy which enables
| an incredible amount of exploitation.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Then the former billionaires won't have the ability to
| influence society to pass laws that favours them. We'll
| finally be able to build a society for everyone.
| ianbutler wrote:
| > We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
|
| I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to
| think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to
| consolidate power for themselves after you remove the
| current set.
|
| Most people are not in it for their fellow man and
| whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only
| impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society --
| lied to you.
|
| By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't
| particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it
| turns out that was just a side quest.
|
| I think there are other avenues here that are probably
| better spent to make society better.
| conception wrote:
| Maybe but society was more egalitarian when we did so
| maybe we start there.
| majormajor wrote:
| Everyone in the US misses the 50s, marginal tax rates
| were crazy high. "Oh, but people had lots of deductions
| and not many people actually paid the top rates" - yeah,
| that's exactly the point, it encouraged money to be
| spread around more. And a whole lot of people prospered,
| while government revenue was less lopsidedly concentrated
| too.
|
| Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and
| you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those
| people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian
| policies. We _know_ that allowing more and more
| consolidation ain 't the move.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| We have 4-5x the normalized GDP per capita compared to
| the 1950s.
|
| The amount of taxes we collect isn't the problem.
| Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures
| on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go
| up regardless of what political side you want to point
| fingers at)
| Skgqie1 wrote:
| While the economic output per person has indeed increased
| 4-5x, the inflation adjusted median household income has
| only increased by 50% (1.5x). Government spending is not
| the issue here.
|
| The things you mentioned are always a problem because
| even the far left in America is incredibly right-wing.
| macawfish wrote:
| https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/fy-2023-fed-
| bu...
| ashdksnndck wrote:
| Defense is only 13% of federal spending:
| https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-
| guide/feder...
|
| Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of
| GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this
| have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs
| have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that
| narrative going:
|
| https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-
| and...
|
| Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many
| billions we still spend on the military can be better
| used elsewhere. There's no need to cook the numbers to
| make that point.
|
| Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the
| US (across the whole economy, not just government). So
| it's hard to claim the problem is we're prioritizing the
| military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a
| systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a
| variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military,
| housing, transit...
| roamerz wrote:
| >> poor value for money across a variety of sectors
|
| Yup this. I went in for a cardiac stress test a few
| months ago. Less than 30 minutes in a room with a
| treadmill, an ekg machine and a low-mid level technician.
| $10k.
| ipaddr wrote:
| What's the pressure in the system keeping the price down?
| Many could supply a treadmill and ekg machine for a few
| hundred.
| theossuary wrote:
| If you include things directly related to, but not
| classified as defense spending, like veterans benefits,
| VA, and the cost of foreign bases; the military is about
| ~20% of the total US budget.
|
| https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2025-PER/pdf/B
| UDG...
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in
| the US (across the whole economy, not just government).
| So it's hard to claim the problem is we're prioritizing
| the military over healthcare.
|
| I don't think that's a hard claim to make in other terms
| than % of gdp--I can't imagine many americans _want_ to
| devote that much of our gdp to it when other countries
| manage a high degree of care with much more efficiency.
| But we seem to have largely talked ourselves out of
| democratic control of such matters, somehow, for some
| reason, repeatedly over the last 70 years or so.
| layoric wrote:
| And who is on the other side of that debt? And how did it
| get there?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| America spends a greater percentage of government money on
| healthcare than many systems with universal healthcare.
| Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs and Military
| medical spending are about 7% of GDP. Add another 1-3% and
| you would be ahead of almost everyone.
|
| And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP.
|
| Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political
| cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations
| loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of
| medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical
| professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical
| practitioners, and electing members who did all of the
| above to Congress.
| erentz wrote:
| Taxing the land and removing zoning limits on it is the big
| hurdle.
| jibal wrote:
| That is not how macroeconomics works.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Debt to who? If every country is in debt who is the
| creditor? Mars?
|
| But you actually said every _major_ country is in debt, so
| do all the major countries owe money to um... _minor_
| countries?
|
| Perhaps it is not the country that is in debt at all, but
| the government? In which case it must owe money to entities
| like people and corporations. The government has powers to
| take money from entities in its jurisdiction and pay its
| debts, it is called taxation. In fact since the money is
| issued by the government in the first place, you could
| consider a token of government debt is actually a token
| _meant_ to pay your taxes with. By lending money to the
| government you receive interest, or in other words a
| discount off your future tax.
|
| All very neat, and why a government being in debt is no
| reason for it to not be able to pay for things.
|
| In fact you might argue that government debt takes money
| out of the economy, so keeping inflation down. This means
| the government can spend more without causing inflation. If
| a government borrows a dollar and spends that dollar, there
| is the same amount of dollars circulating. However if it
| borrows it off someone who is hoarding it, and spends it
| then you create gdp growth. Magic.
|
| Perhaps it's time to get past puritanical hatred of debt?
| onraglanroad wrote:
| Those things have been figured out, you're just choosing not
| to implement them (you generally, not you specifically).
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| We've figured that out, but certain members of society
| decided that extracting wealth through protectionist
| zoning/building code behavior is much, much more lucrative.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| that just moves the figuring out one step to the right.
| knowing how something will work but not knowing how to get
| it implemented means the problem is not completely figured
| out yet.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Exactly. We haven't figured out how to solve the problem,
| because we still have the problem. Maybe it's unsolvable,
| and it's just a limitation in our ability to live
| together in large numbers. Or maybe we need to redirect
| our spending on (among other things) frightfully
| expensive experimental medicine and spend the money on
| things that are a lot cheaper and will help a lot more
| people.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Really? I think I can agree that the zoning isn't helping,
| but claiming we have figured it out seems like bold claim.
| Where _is_ it working? My impression is that housing costs
| are increasing faster than inflation and wages not only in
| North America, but also in the UK and EU, which don't have
| the same kinds of zoning laws.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| It's working in Japan
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| I wouldn't believe most in the US would live in Japanese
| style housing at all.
| EstanislaoStan wrote:
| Why not?
| herewulf wrote:
| The American Dream has become living in a McMansion in
| suburbia?
| trallnag wrote:
| Aren't Japanese homes super tiny? Even smaller than the
| already small homes and apartments in Europe? That's one
| reason. In the US, it seems that people live in bigger
| places, with higher ceilings.
| kiba wrote:
| Most homes in Japan aren't built in the traditional
| Japanese style at all IIRC.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| I was referring to the little space and tiny storage. Pay
| isn't exactly great for the rent either.
| abbycurtis33 wrote:
| Tough problem when laziness and low IQ both correlate to high
| reproduction.
| d6e wrote:
| Housing can be affordable or an investment. It can't be both
| conception wrote:
| This should be an easy choice and yet...
| irjustin wrote:
| At a system level - in Singapore it is. HDB (public) for
| affordable, private for everything else. 75+% of housing is
| part of the HDB system.
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan
| decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical
| Western political system to me. But then again gays were
| only very recently accepted there, right?
| skinnymuch wrote:
| The west doesn't have real democracy either.
|
| For the gay stuff, like the west?
| bmacho wrote:
| In 2001 Texas court prosecuted Lawrence for having gay
| sex in his home (supreme court decided against it 2 years
| later).
| irjustin wrote:
| > Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan
| decades ahead.
|
| I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's
| a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham.
|
| But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was
| setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current
| administration generally does a good job and is voted in
| with strong support.
|
| So agreed, they can do really interesting things because
| of their time horizons of control combined with
| willingness to work for the better of the people.
| nenenejej wrote:
| It can be sort of both. What you need is more housing built
| at affordable prices. But dont oberbuild. In that situation
| housing should act as store of value to avoid inflation
| loss, but not something that you get rich buy borrowing and
| buying up dozens.
|
| You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room
| for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the
| for people sense) in allocating land and building housing.
| Ideally dense housing.
| tpxl wrote:
| > housing should act as store of value
|
| Why? Housing should act as a means to live decently. If
| my house depreciated to 0 once I'd built it, I wouldn't
| mind at all.
|
| > You need socialism to do this efficiently
|
| No you don't, you need to heavily tax empty and secondary
| residences and the issue solves itself in capitalism just
| fine.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > heavily tax ... in capitalism
|
| Many of us are taught that heavy taxation _is_ socialism,
| or at least incompatible with capitalism.
| kiba wrote:
| Hoarding land and land speculation is really the root
| problem.
|
| It's not bad for society if it was used to make building to
| provide rentable space to industries and business or to
| provide homes, or quite often both, but it doesn't provide
| easy money to investors.
|
| Now sitting on land and seeing it appreciate with no hard
| work from you? That's easy money.
| cornholio wrote:
| The key words here are "a basic" level of housing. A house
| in the most exclusive area of town will always be an
| investment (not necessarily a good one), because it
| primarily offers exclusion of other poorer members of the
| society from your surroundings, not habitation for
| yourself. It can't be affordable by definition.
|
| But a basic level of housing is a human right, because it's
| a prerequisite for maintaining your humanity, ditto for
| healthcare.
| Thorrez wrote:
| It's also possible for housing to be neither affordable
| nor an investment. If there's an expensive area of town,
| and property tax is 100%, that would be expensive and I
| don't think people would consider it an investment.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Counterhypothesis: housing that's not affordable is a bad
| investment.
| guidedlight wrote:
| The US can't. This has long been solved in other countries,
| to varying degrees.
| macinjosh wrote:
| can't? lol. more like doesn't want to. not everyone in the
| world shares your personal values.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Very few examples of this. None in democratic countries.
| badpun wrote:
| Finland is a democracy.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Classic whataboutism.
| bawolff wrote:
| In star trek they only figured that out in 2024, so we are
| only a year late.
|
| And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots"
| type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from
| it on the other hand does seem implausible)
|
| [For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became
| a utopia was first the government put poor people in
| internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in
| 2024, which eventually lead to people learning from their
| mistakes and a utopia society. https://memory-
| alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots ]
| russfink wrote:
| So we're getting close in the US government is putting
| certain types of poor people in internment camps.
| winternewt wrote:
| I think we already ticked that box
| ekaryotic wrote:
| the school to prison pipeline is talked about a lot.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| "Close"? It seems many Americans still live in a fantasy.
| Unless y'all start looking into your history, you're
| bound to repeat it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was
| still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear
| exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human
| civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it
| found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically
| superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a
| different perspective :).
|
| But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone
| without the Bell Riots - Star Trek came _this_ close to
| accidentally turning prophetic, as in the months prior
| things really felt like the Riots are going to happen on
| the date.
|
| --
|
| [0] - In that timeline, at least. We've already past
| several important world events that originally happened in
| Trek timeline, so the show keeps shifting the dates to keep
| with the overall premise of being imagined future of real
| humanity.
|
| IIRC the writers now settled on "Romulan temporal agents
| meddling with timeline, desperate to stop the Federation
| from forming, and failing because apparently the cosmos
| really wants UFP to be a thing" as a convenient explanation
| to push WW3, Eugenics Wars, etc. forward every once in a
| while.
|
| [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is
| something of a mystery to me.
| thyristan wrote:
| > [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is
| something of a mystery to me.
|
| There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad
| Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now
| understood to be either less severe than predicted back
| in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill
| people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at
| people or cities, but at military installations such as
| the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will
| be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or
| the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few
| Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity
| would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear
| war SciFi might have imagined.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/
| would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-
| sponge/
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less
| severe than predicted back in the 60s,
|
| Back in the 80s. In the 60s it was just megadeath, with a
| chance of mutants.
|
| (The Krakatoa movie was in 1968, but the winter thing
| took a while to sink in)
| thyristan wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter <- look at
| "Early work".
|
| But you are right that the concept was only made popular
| in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were
| classified or unknown and obscure to the public.
| whycome wrote:
| Back to the future 2 called a Chicago cubs World Series
| win in 2015. It actually happened in 2016.
|
| My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of
| flying cars that's so different from our own is that it
| was the events of the first movie (going back there and
| changing history) that ultimately led us to that
| different path.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| oh we can "figure it out" trivially. There's no technology or
| actual resources preventing that from happening.
|
| But the status quo benefits many parties... alas, "people"
| problems are harder than technical ones. Most humans can be
| remarkably greedy, and also stupid in large groups.
| badpun wrote:
| The US can't, but humanity as a whole can. Finland has both,
| for example.
| Vosporos wrote:
| Sure we can, how do you think our governments have managed to
| avoid it so artfully all this time?
| gniv wrote:
| We're slowly starting to realize that societal problems are
| as hard as (or even harder than) technological problems.
|
| At least we seem to have figured out how to, um, steer large
| populations quickly, now we need to use that to effect
| positive change.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I think Alan Kay deserves the credit for the tablet. We have
| vague allusions to tablet like things before Kay but it was Kay
| who really came up with concept.
| lloeki wrote:
| Does he? It seems to be mostly keyboard operated, and
| references to any stylus interaction seem to be retconed, let
| alone direct touch ones.
|
| My search only finds modern claims that he's the true tablet
| inventor and tablets are touch this and stylus that, but
| these poison results about any possible original reference of
| that interaction model having been conceived at the time.
| iberator wrote:
| What tablet are you talking about?!
| varispeed wrote:
| > "how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be
| human today?"
|
| Progress, invention, is part of being human, so this is natural
| and normal thing that these thing happen. You can stop, marvel,
| and then go improve upon your own niche.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Eh, "figuring out how to deal with it" is the easy part. The
| hard part is first making it work, and then proving its
| effectiveness, scaling it and improving it.
|
| Medical advancements in particular are notorious for having a
| hideously long lead time. This here is an experimental
| procedure that, if all goes well, will only start becoming
| commonplace by year 2035. It's not guaranteed to all go well.
|
| You'd think there would be a massive push for new medical
| technologies that have the potential to save hundreds of
| thousands of lives, and you'd be wrong. Healthcare is where
| innovation goes to die. Most companies that attempt to develop
| this kind of bleeding edge treatment crash and burn either
| before or shortly after seeing the first results. Just the cost
| of early testing of a new treatment option is enough to
| bankrupt many.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Re: "how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be
| human today?" part of your post... I think that came to
| prominence when cheap, effective birth control became
| available. I think it was about the first time that the common
| people could decide to make major alterations in how their
| bodies function. That debate continue in the current fight
| about trans rights.
|
| As science and medicine progress, what was once considered
| solely god-given, or exclusively biologically determined, will
| be for people to decide for themselves, the decision made
| between them and their doctors.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Next is Old Man's War style bodies
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| It really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most
| successful organs for transplantation, even in
| allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that
| they are working well in xeno as well.
|
| Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or
| lung) which probably helps a lot.
|
| Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a
| lot of basic research is still needed to make them work.
|
| My mom worked with eGenesis on pig xenotransplantation,
| particularly lung.
|
| Here are some links if you'd like to donate to the
| International Xenotransplantation Association:
|
| https://donate.tts.org/agnes/
|
| https://tts.org/74-ixa/889-ixa-in-memoriam-agnes-marie-azimz...
| derektank wrote:
| There have already been a couple of attempted heart
| xenotransplants? Lawrence Faucette being the most recent
| patient that I've read about.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| yep, but they didn't last as long. six weeks max I think?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| A family member needed a kidney transplant in the early 60s.
| This was in the UK where the first successful transplant was
| in 1959, so just a few years earlier.
|
| Thanks to a kid on a motorcycle she got a kidney just in the
| nick of time.
|
| She was in her early 20s and was told she could expect a few
| years. Because of that she never had kids.
|
| Her donated kidney served her well and she lived a quite
| normal life. She passed when it finally gave up when she was
| close to 70.
|
| So those "few years" turned into almost 50.
|
| Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong
| medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't
| good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without
| telling the docs of course.
|
| She always wondered if that was the reason it held out so
| long.
| isatty wrote:
| Not a doctor, but I suppose she should've eventually told
| them in the interest of science. Also, pregnancy has a
| heavy toll so who knows? Maybe it was a good thing she
| didn't. We don't know.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Not a doctor, but I suppose she should've eventually
| told them in the interest of science.
|
| Glad she had a largely fulfilling life, but also thinking
| this. As much as it was her choice what to do with her
| body, it's probably a good idea to at least tell the
| healthcare professionals about things like that, even if
| after the fact.
| fooker wrote:
| > it's probably a good idea to at least tell the
| healthcare professionals
|
| No, the pipeline to handle this feedback is completely
| missing from modern medical practices.
|
| There is not really any way for a doctor to make use of
| this information to advance medical research.
| Centigonal wrote:
| > Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some
| strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling
| it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after,
| without telling the docs of course.
|
| Typically, after a kidney transplant, patients are
| instructed to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of
| their lives. This is to reduce the risk of the patient's
| body rejecting the transplanted organ. Your family member
| was just straight up lucky that her body didn't reject the
| organ, even without any immunosuppression.
|
| One thing that's fascinating to me is that most
| immunosuppressant drugs used today hadn't yet been
| discovered in the early 60s! AFAIK, all they would have had
| was prednisone, prednisolone, and azathioprine. Back then,
| a kidney transplant aided by these drugs would have been as
| new and revolutionary as the Hepatitis C cure or the
| triple-drug therapy for cystic fibrosis is today.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Your family member was just straight up lucky
|
| That was my thought as well when she told me. Then again,
| when given just a few years perhaps one considers these
| things a bit differently. The side effects for the drugs
| you listed does indeed not sound like a lot of fun.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Oh yeah, they suck. Long-term effects of just prednisone
| can include everything from muscle weakness to reduced
| bone density to spontaneously developing diabetes.
| Generally, doctors prescribe these kinds of drugs for
| longer than a couple months only in situations where the
| risks of not taking them are worse than the many, many
| side effects of taking them long-term.
| fbxio wrote:
| Amazing story. Thanks for sharing. It shows how resilience
| and intuition matter.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I don't think it shows much.
|
| It's one anecdote. In the hierarch of significance this
| is below even the "one published paper" level which you
| certainly should also ignore even if you know enough to
| interpret the paper.
|
| It's really good she lived for 50 years with an kidney
| transplant. But it is a massive stretch to say that she
| willed herself to last that long.
| jfengel wrote:
| Maybe what we need is more motorcycles.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| They do help a lot[1], especially without helmets[2].
|
| [1]: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/motorcycle-
| rallies-and-o...
|
| [2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33334475/
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Maybe organ donation should be an opt out process.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Totally agree that kidneys are the logical starting point.
| Lower immunological complexity + less vascularization makes
| them more forgiving as a test case. The lung, on the other
| hand... yeah, that's a whole different beast
| gcanyon wrote:
| >...that's a whole different beast
|
| ...so's the donor! (I'll see myself out...)
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Pigs are already helping out with lung transplantation[0].
| It's a ways off from where this kidney trial is, but very
| promising.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/25/surgeons-
| tra...
| tw04 wrote:
| And yet while (legitimate) science can universally agree
| continuing to burn fossil fuels will cause unimaginable chaos
| for planet earth, half the planet doesn't seem to care about
| the impending collapse.
|
| So while in my personal vacuum this is awesome, when I stop to
| consider the situation for 30 seconds I can only think: huh, we
| might have been able to find a new cure for humanity that isn't
| going to matter when having "a profession" (like doctor) is no
| longer relevant to our inevitable hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Legitimate science doesn't concluded unimaginable chaos from
| continuing to burn fossil fuels that's what influencers or
| movies or tiktok reels present because they are part of the
| attention economy where scaring you is profitable.
|
| Besides hunter/gatherers need medicine men who understand the
| old ways.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Most experts don't predict the collapse of industrialized
| society. Higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and more
| energetic weather events will cause damage and make life
| difficult for decent chunks of the population especially
| those in less developed areas that are both hotter and more
| poorly equipped to cope with climate change. But I'm not
| aware of a consensus or even a plurality among climate
| scientists that industrialized society is going to collapse
| even in the more pessimistic predictions.
|
| I'm not sure how Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the company
| building these pig kidneys is located, becomes a hunter-
| gatherer society on account of climate change.
| jondiggsit wrote:
| And people skiing down Mt. Everest. I always like to think
| about progress and our current reality in comparison to Star
| Trek....
| BrtByte wrote:
| We're deep into the part of the sci-fi timeline where the tech
| works, and now the real challenge is cultural, ethical, and
| existential
| amelius wrote:
| We've invented social media, but democracy wasn't ready for
| it.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > But also... we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we
| have the ship's computer from Star Trek, and the early makings
| of the holodeck.
|
| If this is _Star Trek_ then I suppose it 's a good example of
| "be careful what you wish for"...
| latexr wrote:
| > But also... we got the tablets from Star Trek.
|
| They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like
| papers. What we have is presumably superior from a
| technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren't filled
| with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and
| distracted.
|
| > And now we have the ship's computer from Star Trek
|
| No, we _definitely_ do not. If every time they spoke to the
| ship's computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they
| would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.
|
| And you're ignoring we're also in the stages of getting the
| surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave
| New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
| Thorrez wrote:
| >Except their tablets weren't filled with time-wasting
| features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.
|
| >And you're ignoring we're also in the stages of getting the
| surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave
| New World.
|
| Those are more human problems than technological problems.
| latexr wrote:
| They are human problems caused or exacerbated by misuse of
| technology. Mass surveillance and accruement of capital by
| private entities at this scale is only possible due to
| automation.
|
| What difference does it make, anyway? The distinction is
| meaningless when the result is the same.
|
| https://youtu.be/lBS9AHilxg0?t=36
| cogogo wrote:
| It wasn't a tablet but there was a TNG episode about a time
| wasting game that nearly took over the minds of the entire
| crew.
| latexr wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next
| _...
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| They foresaw tiktok and their ilk way in advance.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked
| like papers._
|
| If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be
| doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at
| least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make
| working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to
| support such workflow.
|
| > _What we have is presumably superior from a technological
| standpoint._
|
| The writers were surprisingly prescient about this. Turns
| out, the secret about paper-based workflow isn't that a sheet
| of paper can display anything, but that _you can have a lot
| of them_ , freely arrange them in front of you as you need,
| pass them around, pin up the wall, etc. Multitasking on a
| single swab is strictly inferior to that.
|
| EDIT:
|
| >> _And now we have the ship's computer from Star Trek_
|
| > _No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the
| ship's computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they
| would have either stopped using it or would all be dead._
|
| We definitely _do_ , and this, somewhat unexpectedly, got us
| to the point of being close to having a basic _universal
| translator_ as well.
|
| Computers on Star Trek ships weren't built for conversations,
| and weren't talked with as a regular thing for basic
| operations, so it wasn't like chatting with LLMs. There
| wasn't much opportunity _to_ hallucinate - mostly simple
| queries, translating directly to something you 'd consider a
| "tool call" today. But that's not the actually notable part.
|
| The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's
| computers is that _they understood natural language and
| intent_. They could handle context and indirect references
| and all kinds of phrasings. _This_ was the part we didn 't
| know how to solve until few years ago, until LLMs
| unexpectedly turned out to be the solution. Now, we have
| this.
|
| (Incidentally, between LLMs and other generative models, we
| also have all the major building blocks of a holodeck, except
| for the holographic technology.)
| latexr wrote:
| > If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be
| doing that too.
|
| Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that's just asking
| for trouble. You'd never know where anything is or what
| iPad has what or if it's the current version. Not to
| mention the charging situation and all the e-waste.
|
| > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's
| computers
|
| Under appreciated by whom? It's one of their defining
| features. Are you talking about the real world or the
| characters?
|
| > is that _they understood natural language and intent._
|
| Which LLMs do not. They _fake it_ really well but it's
| still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don't
| really know what you mean and don't know what the right
| answer is. The ship's computer on Star Trek could run
| diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and
| even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs
| frequently fail at even identifying _themselves_. I just
| asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it's GPT-4. And if
| I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a
| different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved
| inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the
| norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be
| malfunctioning.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Would we? What for? Why would we need reams of iPads
| on our desks?_
|
| To use like we'd use paper.
|
| > _Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it's
| still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they
| don't really know what you mean_
|
| That is very much up to debate at this point. But for
| practical purposes in context described here, they do.
|
| > _and don't know what the right answer is._
|
| They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 - the model
| itself is behaving much like a person's inner monologue,
| or like a person who just speaks their thoughts out loud,
| without filtering. It's very much _not_ a database
| lookup.
|
| > _I also disagree that was an underappreciated featured
| of the Star Trek computers, it's one of their defining
| features._
|
| What I meant is, people remember and refer to Star Trek's
| ship computer for its ability to control music, lights or
| shoot weapons, etc. with voice commands. People noticed
| the generality, the shamelessness of interaction, lack of
| structured command language - but rarely I saw anyone
| paying deeper attention to the latter, enough to realize
| the subtle magic that made it work on the show. It wasn't
| just some fuzzy matching allowing for synonyms and filler
| words, but more human-like understanding of the language.
|
| (Related observation: if you pay attention to sliding
| doors on Star Trek vs. reality, you eventually realize
| that Starfleet doesn't just put a 24th century PIR into
| the door frame; for it to work like it does on the show,
| the computer has to track approaching people and predict,
| in real time, whether or not they _want to walk through
| the door_ , vs, just passing by, or standing next to
| them, etc. That's another subtle detail that turns into
| general AI-level challenge.)
|
| > _The ship's computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics
| on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even strange
| pieces of technology._
|
| That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this
| assumption comes from, that a computer _must_ be a
| single, uniform blob of compute? It 's probably because
| people think people are like this, but in fact, even our
| brains have function-specific hardware components.
|
| (I do imagine the scans involve _a lot_ of machine
| learning and sensor fusion, though. That 's actually how
| "life signs" can stop being a bullshit shorthand.)
|
| > _The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even
| identifying themselves._
|
| They'll stop when run with a "who am I?" tool.
|
| > _When the Start Trek computers behaved inconsistently
| like that, they would (rightly) be considered to be
| malfunctioning. Yet you're defending this monumental gap
| as being effectively the same thing. Gene Roddenberry
| must be spinning in his grave._
|
| All I'm saying is, LLMs solved the "understand natural
| language" problem, which solves the language and intent
| recognition part of Star Trek voice interfaces (and
| obviously a host of other aspects of computer's tasks
| that require dealing with semantics). Obviously, they're
| a very new development and have tons of issues that need
| solving, but I'm claiming the _qualitative breakthrough_
| already happened.
|
| Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM.
| That would be a stupid design.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _To use like we 'd use paper._
|
| How we use paper derives not only from our own practical
| needs, but also from the intrinsic limitations of paper.
| Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put
| several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper
| while maintaining a legible font size. The idiosyncratic
| way that tablets were used in Star Trek isn't how people
| would actually do things, it merely reflects the
| limitations of the writers to imagine all of the
| practical implications of technology such as they were
| depicting. It would be like somebody in the 1800s
| speculating about motor vehicles, supposing that teams of
| a dozen or more motor vehicles might be connected using
| ropes and used to tow a single carriage, because that's
| how they did it with horses.
|
| > _To use like we 'd use horses._
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Stacks of paper are used because it 's not possible to
| put several pages worth of text onto a single page of
| paper while maintaining a legible font size._
|
| Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with _one_
| paper sheet-sized screen is a _significant downgrade_.
| Which is why tablets are used primarily for
| entertainment, not for work.
|
| Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around
| you is an _advantage_ , not a limitation, of the paper-
| based workflow.
| Retric wrote:
| No, a single screen is a massive upgrade over using
| stacks of paper.
|
| People vastly prefer digital dictionaries over paper
| dictionaries because you can more quickly find stuff. And
| that's with dictionaries in alphabetical order.
|
| Stacks of paper suck, there's some potential utility in a
| space ship for all the redundancy around independent
| tablets you can hand someone. That's something that
| regularly happens on the show and kind of makes sense,
| but is more a visual reference for the audience. Which is
| where stacks of tablets shine, the viewer can easily
| follow what their doing even if you can't see the screen.
| pavement_sort wrote:
| It can be true that stacks of paper are better than a
| single screen in some ways and worse in others. Other
| people like to be able to spread out multiple sheets of
| paper in front of them, even if you do not. You are
| correct that digital search is a huge plus of having a
| digital interface.
| Retric wrote:
| If we're talking 3-5 pieces of one sided paper for say
| homework you can spread them out nicely, but scale that
| to multiple stacks of loose paper and it invariably
| becomes a mess.
|
| Thus, in practice almost everyone is using multiple
| screens at work when they can even if printing stuff is
| trivial.
| latexr wrote:
| > They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101
|
| > (...)
|
| > Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM.
| That would be a stupid design.
|
| Or, in other words, we _don't_ have Star Trek's computer
| like originally claimed, and our current closest solution
| isn't the way to get it.
| mapt wrote:
| > If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be
| doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at
| least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make
| working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to
| support such workflow.
|
| The price of a lowend Android tablet can be shockingly low,
| to the point that physical multitasking is totally
| practical for an environment as expensive as space travel.
| The issue is bloat. The UI for a Trek level starship could
| easily run on 1999 era PC hardware much less powerful than
| a 2025 postage stamp of an SOC, if we were still coding
| like it was 1999. But not if it has to run Android Infinity
| with subpixel AI super resolution, a voice interface, and
| no less than 70MB of various JavaScript frameworks crammed
| into a locked Chromium frontend.
|
| I run a Motorola mobile device at work (retail) that would
| be competitive with 10-15 year old flagship phones. The
| browser interface is designed for tracking and ease of
| development and to show off new AI tools. It employs
| landing pages, phased loading, a bunch of dynamic things.
| Looking up a SKU number takes 2-5 minutes (MINUTES) to load
| things I could get in ten milliseconds on a console
| interface or hundreds of milliseconds in a 1999 World Wide
| Web e-commerce site.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| People keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just
| the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The states were listening to people through their TVs in
| the 1940s?
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| They were listening to people through their wall art.
|
| Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive
| microphone that was used to listen to people from their
| furniture [0].
|
| The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to
| listen in to embassies is more about the economics of
| scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't
| exist at the time.
|
| At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have
| neighbors name and shame people who complained about the
| government. But there is little really in 1984 that's
| about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek
| or even Brave New Word is.
|
| [0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which
| is mostly just trivia related to this question.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| Not "just", the inspiration came from many angles:
| Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, Spanish repression of POUM,
| Wartime Britain (where the shape of the TVs come from) and
| multiple other dystopian novels.
|
| People seems to forget that Orwell was a anti-Stalinist
| socialist.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I don't know too much about POUM, but my understanding
| was that in Homage to Catalonia he's concerned with the
| Spanish Communist Party's suppression of POUM. So I think
| that is consistent with what I said above.
|
| I haven't forgotten that Orwell was an anti-Stalinist
| socialist. But there weren't any anti-Stalinist socialist
| states at the time.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| There are a few episodes about holodeck failures due to
| verbal instructions interpreted incorrectly (notably the
| Moriarty episode). Ship in a Bottle even has prompt injection
| when Moriarty figures out he can summon the arch.
|
| Plus, the captains ask tons of questions a computer would
| know, but only the bridge crew are trusted with.
| balamatom wrote:
| The class divide might rather be likened to _The Time
| Machine_
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| > And you're ignoring we're also in the stages of getting the
| surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave
| New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
|
| Not disagreeing with you at all, but the surveillance on
| Starfleet vessels and facilities is almost complete and all-
| encompassing. Real-time location, bodily attributes,
| eavesdropping, access to all communication and computer data,
| personal and otherwise, I don't think there's anything that
| is private in their world! Remember that time The Doctor
| started a two-way video call with (I think) B'Elanna while
| she was in the shower? That being said, Starfleet is a
| paramilitary organisation, perhaps it's less awful in
| civilian life when one isn't wearing a Comm badge.
|
| I wonder if you and I would consider this degree of
| invasiveness an acceptable compromise with a life almost
| completely without illness, any form of capitalism and the
| opportunity to pursue pretty much any life path we wish, in a
| society which is largely at peace with itself.
| mulmen wrote:
| > No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the
| ship's computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they
| would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.
|
| "The computer is malfunctioning" has been a plot device in
| Star Trek since the beginning.
| rotexo wrote:
| The stacks of tablets were because of DRM (a cybersecurity
| method to manage the threats of data exfiltration, "Digital
| Romulan Management")
| worldsavior wrote:
| Sci-Fi movies aren't that far from reality. It was just a
| matter of time.
| justinclift wrote:
| Seems like we'd want to be careful about the one(s) we're
| picking though.
|
| Sci-Fi movies don't tend to be all happy, happy, fun and joy
| for everyone in them. o_O
| worldsavior wrote:
| Unfortunately not everyone is careful.
| notmyjob wrote:
| The "pigmen" as you insensitively refer to them aren't
| necessarily seniors. Organ failure affects men of all ages and
| the patients themselves are not to blame, often they have
| terrible support structures surrounding them and other factors
| beyond their control. You can be optimistic and compassionate
| simultaneously.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > "Xenotransplantation" is pretty #%^*ing metal
|
| Replacing human heart valves with pig valves has been a thing
| at least as far back as the 1970s with decade-ish survival
| rates.
|
| Granted TFA is about a whole organ -- not just a piece of
| tissue -- but xenotransplantation _per se_ is not new.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| Keep in mind the amazing thing is the survival of having the
| transplant in addition to kidney failure. People have been living
| up to five years without kidneys by relying on dialysis.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Dialysis is hell.
|
| I had a friend that chose to die, after several months on a
| home dialysis machine.
| quasarj wrote:
| That's rough, I'm sorry for your loss. I've been on dialysis
| for 5 years now (in-center, I couldn't do home for..
| reasons). In the beginning I was considering giving up, but
| it did finally get somewhat better, and I'm fairly well
| adjusted now. I mean, it still sucks (especially losing about
| 5 hours 3 days a week), but I'm able to not think about it
| when I'm not there, at least.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Damn. Sorry to aggravate. I sincerely wish you well.
| basisword wrote:
| >> Dialysis is hell.
|
| I've seen this sentiment before but I've been unable to find
| an explanation why. Searching around it's noted as relatively
| painless.
|
| Can anyone explain why it's so difficult?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have never experienced it, myself, but have seen several
| close friends deal with it.
|
| They always come back wiped out, and sick.
|
| Usually, it's a temporary thing; meant to keep you going,
| until a full cure (like a transplant) can be effected.
|
| My friend made his decision, because a transplant was not
| an option. He would need to live like that, for the rest of
| his life. I have a couple of other acquaintances, that got
| transplants, and were able to go past dialysis.
| basisword wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I can see how something that
| intense can look very different if you know it's
| temporary vs knowing it's forever.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| It would be interesting what the genetically modified pig looks
| like.
| pmccrory wrote:
| some say it looks like a small human boy
| NathanaelRea wrote:
| Porco Rosso
| dbancajas wrote:
| Ghibli! I didn't expect someone would make this comment!
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Exactly like a pig.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| They have nothing special visually.
|
| https://www.kgri.keio.ac.jp/en/research-frontiers/papers/202...
|
| There are talks to breed them smaller for better handling, as
| they need to live inside the regulated facility. Having a human
| size animal roaming around is physically complicated to deal
| with.
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| Pig-human organ transplants make me think of The Onion series,
| Porkin' Across America.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwQns6vGfj4&list=PL4NL9i-Fu1...
| StephenAmar wrote:
| So I'm not alone who knows about this series.
| c0balt wrote:
| This was not what I expected but thank you for sharing. The
| onion does not cease to amaze me in eccentric productions
| abxyz wrote:
| well, that was horrifying. I'm getting a "Do Not Transplant Pig
| Organs" tattoo urgently.
| parpfish wrote:
| I was just thinking about heart transplants and how they're
| treated as commonplace now, but they are nuts when you think
| about them.
|
| You can hook up the nerve wires and blood pipes from one body
| into the heart from another body and it works? Just thinking
| about the simple physical connections would make me nervous. Why
| isn't there blood just leaking out in your body? Why isn't that
| other heart sliding out of place while you move around?
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Blood pipes yes, nerves no. Transplanted hearts are de-
| enervated.
| amarant wrote:
| Heart surgeons are straight up deleting the equivalent of
| dead code produced by evolution.
|
| Heart surgeons are superheroes.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Fun fact: the nerves between the brain and heart are never
| reattached. A heart already has all of the facilities to keep
| working all by itself.
|
| Even weirder is that an adult kidney transplanted into a child
| will actually shrink to fit.
| krackers wrote:
| But presumably the nerves between the brain and heart exist
| for a reason. What functionality do you lose by not
| reattaching them? Do things like "heart beating faster when
| nervous" depend on this nerve signaling, or is it done via
| other chemical signaling.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Reading up on this there is some chemical signaling from
| the blood, but the brain is not controlling the rate of the
| new heart
| johnisgood wrote:
| That is actually wild and I wonder about the practical
| consequences as well.
|
| So you get into a stressful situation or get a flee or
| flight response, and your heart is not affected by it, or
| at least the heart rate, but your cardiovascular system
| may be needed because in that case the rest of your body
| is, and presumably you may need much more blood to be
| pumped out to your organs among other things.
|
| It is a cool food for thought.
| jessriedel wrote:
| He's asking about what the nerves do in a normal person
| jessriedel wrote:
| Yes, nerves from the brain to the heart can influence heart
| beat (and other features like heart conduction and blood
| flow to the heart itself) in response to stress and
| exercise. Heart transplant recipients lose these features.
| They make poor marathon runners :)
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Heart rate muscle tissue is largely influenced by hormones.
| The sympathetic system releases noradrenaline to speed up
| the heart rate, while the parasympathetic system releases
| acetylcholine to slow it down. But the release of these
| hormones is controlled by nerves, which are largely
| severed. So you typically end up with a less "dynamic"
| heart rate -- resting rate higher and responsiveness to
| stimuli reduced. These nerve connections can regenerate to
| some degree but it's individual and rarely close to what
| they were before.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Another fun fact: you can remove all of the brain of a cat on
| threadmill except the brainstem and he'll keep walking.
| knotimpressed wrote:
| ...Do you have a link? I'm not sure if I want to see proof
| of that, but I'm at the same time curious how you'd manage
| to do it without disturbing the cat.
| _ink_ wrote:
| Will it grow again as the kid ages?
| teraflop wrote:
| It's not exactly the same as a biological heart transplant (I
| assume), but you might be interested in reading the surgical
| instruction manual for a SynCardia artificial heart:
| https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf3/P030011c.pdf
|
| For instance, there's a fun diagram on page 11.
|
| There's also an operator's manual for the "driver" that powers
| the heart:
| https://www.vumc.org/cvicu/sites/default/files/2020-03/Opera...
| Which includes all kinds of (appropriately!) paranoid warnings
| such as:
|
| > To avoid accidentally switching off the AC power to a docked
| Driver, do not plug the Driver into any electrical outlet
| controlled by a wall switch.
| BrtByte wrote:
| The part that always gets me is the lack of nerve reconnection
| - the heart keeps beating on its own, no nervous system hookup
| required. It's literally running off internal timing, like a
| mechanical watch made of cells
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| A human counting is also a mechanical watch made of cells.
| tsoukase wrote:
| In all viscera sympathetic and para- keep balance of muscle
| function. But in steady state the para- must fire more
| powerfully because the sympathetic intrinsically dominates a
| little. So if you cut off both systems, the organ has a
| sympathetic boost. In heart's case this will make it beat
| faster, I believe about 20-30 more beats per minute (after some
| self-compensation). This is easily treated with a beta blocker.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I have always wondered what decision I would make facing such a
| health concern.
|
| > Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a "fantastic
| long-term outcome", he adds.
|
| I am surprised by this being considered a long-term outcome
| though. Going through the high risk of a kidney transplant,
| immunosuppression required, risk of using a pig kidney in
| general, etc seems like a lot if the hope is for 12 months as a
| long-term unlikelihood.
| quasarj wrote:
| I've been on dialysis for 5 years now... which means when I
| eventually get listed for transplant, I'll be at the top of the
| list, because nobody survives 5 years...
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| My thoughts with you wish you the best. Curious why you
| aren't already on a waiting list for a transplant?
| quasarj wrote:
| The rules are very strict, primarily with respect to
| weight. That is, was (and still am) fat, and that's a no-
| no. I've lost 120 pounds so far, with at least 10 more to
| go before I will finally be (possibly) approved!
| cogman10 wrote:
| And this is why this is so exciting. The rules are so
| strict because kidney supply is extremely limited and
| they want to maximize the life of the kidney as much as
| possible.
|
| Having a ready supply of pig kidneys would be fantastic.
| All the sudden it wouldn't matter as much that you are a
| bad candidate, you might end up simply cycling through
| pig kidneys more frequently.
| TMWNN wrote:
| This may offer some hope: Thomas Yuen lived for 42 years on
| dialysis. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Yuen>
| ACCount37 wrote:
| The alternative is dialysis, which isn't a good patient
| experience at all. And this is an experimental procedure,
| testing an early version of the xenotransplant technology. A
| bad long term outcome would be "the organ ends up rejected
| within two weeks, and does some damage to the patient while at
| it".
|
| In a perfect world, this tech would work first try, and the
| xenotransplant would last for decades. We don't live in a
| perfect world.
|
| If this proves a workable stopgap, bridging the wait time for
| the people waiting for donor organs, extending lives of those
| who don't qualify for organ donations? It might be worth using
| on those grounds alone. And it's likely that organ longevity
| could be improved iteratively.
|
| I.e. use an organ to failure, figure out what went wrong and
| what the host immune system has reacted to, find a way to gene
| edit around that, get another 6 months of transplant longevity
| in the next version. Rinse and repeat.
|
| Yes, we don't know what the true limits are - "universal and
| permanent organ replacement" is very much on the table with
| this tech. But it's pretty clear: getting all the way there
| wouldn't be quick or easy. A year of organ lifetime is a damn
| good start.
| ec109685 wrote:
| It was unlikely outcome since nobody had lived there long on a
| pig organ. It is a good milestone since people who live that
| long, tend to have a good long-term prognosis.
| analog8374 wrote:
| Is he full of tubes?
| projektfu wrote:
| We all are...
| analog8374 wrote:
| You know what I mean. A person hooked up to a machine might
| not even need a kidney.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I remember interviewing for a bioinformatics role at a certain
| San Diego company 8 years ago and being told by the staff they
| were working on humanizing pig kidneys.
|
| I thought it was a fucking insane idea and wanted to leave
| immediately.
|
| Turns out I am a fool.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Does anyone know why it's so easy to get kidney transplants in
| China?
| quasarj wrote:
| That's a (bad) joke, right?
| RossBencina wrote:
| Not sure this is any more surprising than a human surviving with
| a Chimpanzee kidney transplant.
| https://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html
| denismi wrote:
| It is fucking wild that we need to resort to putting pig kidneys
| into humans to squeeze out a few more months of life, while tens
| of millions of perfectly good human organs are burned or left to
| rot in the ground each year.
| downboots wrote:
| pig of Theseus
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Richard Slayman was a pioneer. He made an amazing decision, to
| see if it could be done. This was hard work done through
| eGenesis, and the steps to get to this point is quite
| interesting.
|
| >> First, the donors were often created on a commercial pig breed
| whose heart and kidney sizes are too large for human application.
| Although elimination of growth hormone receptor gene expression
| could reduce organ sizes, it comes with other undesired
| biological consequences. Second, the donors were designed for
| testing in OWMs. They lacked the a-Gal
| (galactose-a-1,3-galactose) or the a-Gal and Sd(a)
| (Sia-a2.3-[GalNAc-b1.4]Gal-b1.4-GlcNAc) glycans but expressed the
| Neu5Gc (N-glycolylneuraminic acid) glycan to match with Neu5Gc
| expression in OWMs. However, in vitro analysis suggests that a
| human-compatible porcine donor should ideally have all three
| glycans eliminated to match with the absence of the three glycans
| in humans. Although renal grafts derived from the porcine donors
| lacking these three glycans and carrying various human transgenes
| have been tested in OWMs, graft survival was short8 or not all
| human transgenes were expressed. Third, the donors carried
| porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV) sequences in their genome,
| which present a zoonotic risk, as PERV transmission to human
| cells in culture and their integration into the human genome have
| been demonstrated.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06594-4
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Slayman
| projektfu wrote:
| OWM is old-world monkey, for those who don't bio.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| Transplanted kidneys get rejected by the recipient's immune
| system eventually, you'd really need to clone the kidney from the
| individual's DNA to solve the rejection problem. There's also
| been some success with integrating the DNA from the kidney donor
| (a human) into the recipient's bone marrow to stop the rejection
| process, but I hear it can be a brutal procedure in which the
| original bone marrow must be destroyed using chemotherapy or
| radiation.
|
| https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/video-eliminat...
|
| https://www.immunofree.com/how-it-works/
|
| If I were a patient, I'd probably want a pig kidney now and
| really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning is a
| thing.
| goku12 wrote:
| > and really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning
| is a thing.
|
| There was another technology under development, colloquially
| called the 'ghost heart' [1]. It uses a dead heart that's
| similar to a human's, most likely a pig's heart (I speculate
| that an unused human heart can also be used). They remove all
| the cells from the heart using a soap-like substance to obtain
| a ghostly white colored scaffolding of a heart (probably made
| of collagen). Then they use the recipient's own stem cells to
| grow heart muscles, blood vessels, etc on the scaffold. The
| process to get it to work like a human heart seems complicated,
| but doable. As you can guess, this heart is fully
| immunocompatible with the patient and doesn't require
| immunosuppressants like after a regular transplant. I imagine
| that this can eventually be replicated for any organ and that
| the improvement in the patient's quality of life it will bring
| is unthinkable in the current state of affairs. I'm not sure
| about the progress and current state of this technology, but
| several articles do turn up on searching.
|
| [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/01/health/ghost-heart-
| life-i...
| hinkley wrote:
| Any time I haven't heard about a tech for ten years I assume
| it didn't work. I think I first heard of this stuff around
| ten years ago. At the time I think they were focused on
| kidneys. But those have a lot of complex plumbing.
|
| As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context,
| or not so close to the problem they can't see it, I would
| assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for
| bypasses and aneurism repair operations. Ghost intestines for
| reconstruction surgery for people with cancer or massive
| internal trauma. You'd have a simpler organ to reproduce, but
| in the artery case you'd likely have to also work turnaround
| time. Heart failure can be slow, but bypass surgery is often
| scheduled as either urgent or emergency (I just had a convo
| with a man who wasn't allowed to leave the hospital after an
| angiogram showed he was one stairwell away from a fatal heart
| attack). But not having to harvest material from the thigh
| before surgery begins should shorten the surgery and reduce
| complications. You can have as much artery as you want for
| the surgery. You could have spares.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It's not entirely impossible that a broadly compatible tissue
| could be engineered - in a more through version of the same
| process that yielded those "somewhat human-compatible" pig
| organs.
|
| That's a part of the reason why this tech is so promising. If
| we can already target immune incompatibilities to make
| "elongated pigs" with organs that fit human bodies somewhat,
| then what are the limits?
| AfterHIA wrote:
| We're rooting for you pal! Stay strong.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| How is the pig doing?
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Porkly
| mjlee wrote:
| It just needed some oinkment.
| matonski wrote:
| "This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living
| person." Not quite the way I thought it should be phrased...
| goku12 wrote:
| A bit of medical and historical context seems to invert its
| interpretation entirely. For example Louis Washkansky, the
| recipient of the first human transplant (performed by Dr.
| Christiaan Barnard in 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa) lived
| for only 18 days before passing away from pneumonia. But nobody
| considers that historical fact as a negative when thinking
| about heart transplants these days. In comparison, this
| statement about the pig kidney is actually very exciting. It
| means that the xenotransplantation technology is progressing
| rapidly and will soon become widely available. They seem to
| have overcome most of the serious difficulties in the process.
| BrtByte wrote:
| What seems like a small step now often ends up being the
| foundation for something revolutionary a decade later
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It means that the xenotransplantation technology is
| progressing rapidly and will soon become widely available_
|
| It also validates the platform. If it can last for 6 months,
| chances are there isn't some catastrophic failure mode that
| would keep it from lasting for 6 or 60 years.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I think the person you replied to was objecting to the fact
| that the wording makes it sound like we're using humans as
| vessels for extending the life of pig organs outside of pigs.
|
| Not necessarily that 6 months is a short period of time.
| goku12 wrote:
| That's an interesting way to interpret it! I see what you
| mean, but I still can't see myself interpreting that
| headline in that way. Does it really give that vibe?
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Yeah I re-read it now and don't feel so strongly about
| it. But I think its the sentence structure:
|
| "This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living
| person"
|
| The pig organ is the first thing mentioned, with the
| living person last.
|
| Whereas:
|
| "This is the longest time a patient has survived after a
| pig organ transplant."
|
| This puts the patient first, and doesn't give as much of
| that kind of vibe.
|
| Edit: Actually, that updated sentence may need some
| adjustment. I assume when organ transplants fail we don't
| just let people die with them. So maybe that's why the
| original sentence had such emphasis on the survival of
| the pig organ...
| kartoffelsaft wrote:
| Seeing as the subject of the sentence is the pig organ,
| it's saying the organ is the one doing the surviving and
| only tangentionally mentions the person surviving by
| calling then living. I (and presumably we) only come to a
| different interperetation because I have the context that
| the latter is the important bit. If I give some other
| similarly structured sentences but without context, how
| would you interperet these?
|
| - This is the fastest Alice had driven since Bob broke
| the speed limit.
|
| - This is the oldest tree still standing in the burnt
| forest.
|
| - This is the most stable chemical additive to our long-
| lasting concrete.
|
| Without context, to me these examples sound primarily
| about Alice going fast, the tree being old, and the
| chemical being stable. But if those appeared in articles
| about traffic law, natural disasters, and sidewalk
| design, then these phrasings might be less ambiguous if
| flipped (as another commentor pointed out).
| jjmarr wrote:
| Well, the pig organ could fail immediately, causing the
| person to go back on dialysis for 6 months. That person
| would've also lived for 6 months after a transplant.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The organ can die without the human dying too, so it makes
| sense to phrase it that way
| ashu1461 wrote:
| This surpasses the previous record of 4 months
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/longest-human-transp...
|
| Pretty amazing tech tbh
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| How about the donor piggy though?
|
| If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for
| their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people
| already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial
| scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)
| october8140 wrote:
| The donor pig is turned into bacon. Normally the liver goes in
| the trash.
| goku12 wrote:
| Asking out of ignorance. Why is the liver thrown out? Isn't
| it edible too?
| Maxion wrote:
| Who would eat it these days? The same with e.g. sheepskins.
| The labor to process them in western countries is so high
| so they generally just get thrown away.
| mjlee wrote:
| I was under the impression it went in to livestock/pet
| food. Perhaps there just isn't enough demand.
| goku12 wrote:
| Does the same apply to offal of other animals? I thought
| that liver didn't need much processing. What am I missing
| here?
| gus_massa wrote:
| I like cow liver, it's nasty to handle while raw, but I
| like it cooked in thin beefs with fried onion.
|
| I also like chicken liver. It's small enough to be cooked
| whole.
|
| I'd like to try pig liver.
| beeflet wrote:
| some animals are more equal than others
| shellfishgene wrote:
| I'm pretty sure a pig raised for donor organs will be better
| cared for than one raised for cheap pork chops...
| tombert wrote:
| While I agree that it's is pretty hard to ethically justify
| killing a pig for food, but I think I am ok with all that pig
| killing being used for helping sick humans.
|
| While I don't think we should be torturing animals or anything,
| obviously, I think I am humanist enough to where I think the
| ethical thing is to prioritize human lives or avoiding severe
| long-term discomfort (as is the case with dialysis).
| daedrdev wrote:
| The ethical reasoning is we don't care about the pigs, millions
| of lives will be saved by exno kidney transplants. The argument
| is already very strong that we should pay to donate their
| kidneys given the scale of death (especially among the poor)
| kidney disease already causes, so a pig is nothing in
| comparison
| nanolith wrote:
| I'm living with heart failure. I have 20-30 years before I'll
| need a transplant, if I live a perfect lifestyle and keep my
| other health issues under control. Due to my other health
| issues, I am not a good candidate for a human heart transplant.
| It's not that a human heart transplant would fail, but that
| when I'd be placed against others on the list for a new heart,
| my other health issues would reduce my priority such that there
| is always someone with higher priority to receive a heart, up
| until the point in which I'm no longer healthy enough to
| receive a transplant. There are far too few human hearts, and
| far too many people who need one. All that the transplant
| boards can do is give hearts to those with the greatest
| momentary need, with the best chance of surviving.
|
| Xenotransplantation is one of the life lines I'm counting on.
| I'm hoping that, by the time I need it, the issues that we
| currently have will be worked out. I have zero ethical issues
| with breeding and eventually culling pigs in order to save
| human lives. I hope that there will be other, better,
| breakthroughs by then, but if not, the best I can hope for is
| that the pigs are raised in a sterile and enriching
| environment, and that the only bad day they have is their last
| day.
| BrtByte wrote:
| That's genuinely impressive. Six months without dialysis after a
| xenotransplant is no small milestone, especially considering how
| many hurdles this field has faced over the years. The level of
| genetic modification involved shows how far biotech has come.
| Still, it's hard not to wonder about the long game.
| Immunosuppression, organ longevity, possible unforeseen
| complications - all big unknowns
| 55555 wrote:
| I can't read the full article -- what happened with the other two
| recipients? Science is amazing!
| lwarfield wrote:
| I ran into this guy nere Interlaken 2 days ago! Had a nice long
| talk at the post office over how he was going to present this in
| Geneva. I heard that this is result is with little or no
| rejection drugs as well!
| ChaoPrayaWave wrote:
| Medical history has seen many "miracles." Hopefully, this time,
| it will become something more people can replicate and learn
| from, rather than just a flashy headline.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Is he healthy? How much immunotherapy, if any, is he on? Alive is
| a low bar.
| grantseltzer wrote:
| Alive is a very high bar considering the alternative.
| wosined wrote:
| Catgirls when?
| wolfgangbabad wrote:
| I thought AI will solve all our problems.
| nntwozz wrote:
| If this works, does the reverse also work?
| sgt wrote:
| Yes, pig scientists are working on this very problem right now.
| It gets almost zero attention from human scientists, though.
| kypro wrote:
| What we really need to work out is how we can incubate humans
| outside of the womb so we can create brain-dead humans for organ
| harvesting. Would be both more reliable and more humane than
| this. Plus you could harvest the heart, liver, etc at the same
| time. While this is great news, my understanding is that kidneys
| donors are in larger supply because often family members can give
| one of theres. This obviously isn't the case for organs like
| hearts and livers.
| watusername wrote:
| I assume that you are being sarcastic and referencing The
| Island movie?
| dcanelhas wrote:
| I wonder what the prognosis was right after the operation. The
| article makes it sound a bit like this outcome was totally
| unexpected.
|
| Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe there's
| more to diabetes than just a new pancreas. Interesting
| development, in any case. Thanks for sharing.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I think the major worry is that the body rejects the
| transplant. If that happens, things can turn really bad really
| fast. The body will attack the kidney and completely wreck it.
| They'd probably need surgery to remove it.
|
| He'd probably need to go on dialysis if that were to happen.
| How long he'd survive IDK. I think I've read that people
| survive around 2 years on dialysis.
|
| > Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe
| there's more to diabetes than just a new pancreas.
|
| It can be. That was the first developed insulin. I believe it's
| completely synthetic at this point.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| ...still alive but has developed an overwhelming urge to forage
| for truffles.
| vstm wrote:
| New side hustle unlocked
| The_President wrote:
| News headline in the not so distant future:
|
| "Man Suffers Unfortunate Loss From Ex Wife, Shows Up at ER with
| Horse"
| oksurewhynot wrote:
| Does this mean you can catch pig kidney diseases (they
| specifically mention turning of a few retroviruses)? I'm assuming
| pig kidneys are immune to certain human diseases and vice versa.
| Kind of wild that you have a single organ running an entirely
| different mammalian OS distro but it is similar enough that it
| Just Works.
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