Here’s some news about which only animal rights believers will be upset: Scientists have developed a technique for maintaining pig lungs that could permit them to be used in human transplantation within five years. From the story:
Scientists in Melbourne, Australia, used a ventilator and pump to keep the animal lungs alive and “breathing” while human blood flowed in them. Experts estimated the work could lead to the first animal-human transplants within five years. Dr Glenn Westall, who helped conduct the experiment, said: “The blood went into the lungs without oxygen and came out with oxygen, which is the exact function of the lungs. “It showed that these lungs were working perfectly well and doing as we were expecting them to do. “This is a significant advance compared to experiments that have been performed over the past 20 years.” The breakthrough came after scientists were able to remove a section of pig DNA, which had made the pig organs incompatible with human blood.
Obviously, there is much work left to do. But if this works, it will save many lives. Question, what about the worry of porcine viruses crossing the species barrier?
A bioethicist asked to comment is just confused:
Human DNA is now added to the pigs as they are reared to reduce clotting and the number of lungs which are rejected…The issue has prompted an ethical debate about the use of animals for human transplants. Medical ethicist Professor Nicholas Tonti-Filippini said: “It is basically a human-pig, a hybrid, or whatever you want to call it. “It is about whether the community is prepared to accept a part human, part animal.”
No, creating a transgenic animal–such the sheep from which pharming is done to obtain difficult to obtain enzymes–isn’t an ethical problem in that it does not impact on the essential natures of either the pigs or the potential human organ recipients. And the pig organs will not impact the germ lines of the recipients at all.
That point aside, yet again we see the tremendous value of animal research. While one can make the moral argument that it is wrong to sacrifice pigs for humans–I disagree but respect the argument–I don’t think one can say with intellectual integrity that such experiments do not provide significant real and potential human benefit.
February 4th, 2010 | 7:26 am
[...] Wesley Smith thinks that only those interested in ‘animal rights’ would oppose a possible new way to save human lives: Scientists have developed a technique for maintaining pig lungs that could permit them to be used [...]
February 4th, 2010 | 9:18 am
It sounds as if these were transgenic pigs with a gene or genes inactivated or “knocked-out”. While this result is a definite advance there is much to be discovered and worked out before clinical work is feasible.
February 4th, 2010 | 2:06 pm
Nothing astounding here. Pigs have an analogous organ layout to humans, and their heart valves have been used by humans for decades. Anyway, it seems silly for people to complain that putting some pig organs to use is cruel — especially those who enjoy ham sandwiches and spare ribs.
February 5th, 2010 | 4:29 pm
And consider how may humans get called pigs.
I might be fine with it as long as the lungs came from a pig that was killed for bacon, sausage, and the like (it would be disrespectful not to use every part of the animal, by which logic leather is ok; fur isn’t ok, because not only wasn’t the whole animal used, the animal wasn’t killed for food). The problem is, the rest of what went into it is a whole lot of unforgiveable stuff that took place in laboratories, and it’s one thing to transplant from one human to another with the human’s consent (though I’m not wild about the idea even then), and another to transplant from one species to another, which just doesn’t ring right. Every cell in a body resonates with THAT body. Kill it eat it and digest it is one thing; walk around with it having been installed in oneself is quite another.
February 6th, 2010 | 11:49 am
Ianthe: you may find it interesting that until 1982, when the first genetically engineered insulin was produced, the main source of it for human diabetics was chemically altered animal insulin, obtained at first from dogs but later from the pancreases of cattle and pigs. Are you ready to write off all those Type I diabetics who managed to extend their lives by “walking around with it installed in themselves” prior to the 1982 breakthrough.
February 6th, 2010 | 12:05 pm
Ianthe:
Wesley is right about the use of animals in medical research as not being unethical. He and I probably agree on this for different reasons: he on the basis of human exceptionalism, and I on the basis of practicality.
But, at the end of the day there’s only so much hypothesizing and computer modeling researchers can do before they have to test a new drug or surgical technique on a living patient, and one hardly expects to begin the process on humans when there are other, more expendible species available.
Granted you may think it’s cruel and unusual to use Fido for surgery practice, but you should know that the earliest open-heart surgery technique — repair of a congenital opening between the right and left sides of the heart that produced so called “blue babies” — was perfected on dogs. Are we better for it? Ask any of the open-heart surgical patients who owe their lives to the initial breakthrough made at Johns Hopkins in 1944.
February 6th, 2010 | 1:55 pm
I’m sorry to tell you, HW, that I do NOT have sympathy for diabetics. A lot of diabetics won’t like me for saying that, but the truth is, I don’t. Long before I became interested in animal rights I noticed that there is something off-kilter in many diabetics, which is the connection between body and the rest of what a person is. I know a whole bunch of them, in fact, the world would be better off without. The insulin, wherever it comes from, hasn’t balanced them out or made them undestructive. I do know people I’m glad are still around because of open heart surgery, as well as people who were and are evil and didn’t deserve the help, but overall, no, I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think vivisection is ok or justifiable, period, and I don’t think western medicine deserves the credit it gets.
February 6th, 2010 | 2:24 pm
As for Johns Hopkins, I never thought much of it, HW. My uncle, the late brother of my late murdered mother, was a physician trained at Johns Hopkins. He used to tell the story of the professor for his obstetrics course telling the students always to deliver babies by appointment because it’s more convenient for the doctor. Which reminds me of a kid I was raised with who I knew was an ass when I was three (at which age I punched him out, to the chagrin of both families) who was going to be a doctor, had so little understanding of what it really was to be educated that he made file cards of words to increase his vocabulary so that he could get into med school, claimed he wanted to be a pediatrician, and then decided on ophthalmology because he didn’t want to get calls in the middle of the night. That’s what doctors are these days. His son, by the way, wants to be a “bioethicist,” and his objection to that isn’t the correct one, but rather that how is he going to make any money that way. I could go on and on about med students and doctors whom I’ve known personally, plus the observations I’ve made of a whole bunch of them as a patient who’s come close to dying several times but more than once managed to survive, even not lose a limb, thanks to following my own rather than their judgement (and by the way if anyone knows how fine the line is between life and death, and why it’s a good idea to stay on this side of it, I do) but to return to my uncle, who happened to be my favorite relative on my mother’s side: He ended up with very bad heart trouble, but despite my repeated entreaties that he try alternative medicine techniques which I’m sure were plentifully available in Austin, Texas, where he practiced, he insisted on dying as he lived, in thrall to the God of western medicine. His widow, who died a year of so later (they were very close and both smoked like fish), was very proud to have been married to a doctor and said, “He was a doctor through and through.” In other words, limited in his thinking, incapable of logic, unaware that he did not know what he did not know, and stubborn as hell. I could give another example, with the public aspect of which you might even be familiar through the New York media, but why bother. Doctor — Johns Hopkins — SO WHAT? There ARE good, intelligent doctors, but they are trapped in a medical establishment that is unworthy of the profession, which no longer exists as a profession. At the apex of that establishment stands Johns Hopkins — about which I’ve never had a good intuitive feeling. Sure enough, when the hospital that murdered my mother was trying to get me to agree to her murder, it sent in attending physicians to try to convince me — in my mother’s room, in her hearing, no less. Maybe they figured the one who shares my ethnic heritage might sway me by asking me about the Greek church in town is and where to get good feta cheese (he’d been here a year by then); that bozo was too worried about his position at the hospital to be worth anything, and was just as dumb as the other one who said his mother had said she’s had a good life and wouldn’t want it prolonged, and didn’t even get it when I asked whether he was my sister. They had not one, but at least two, idiots who tried that line of reasoning, because, after all, if their mother had produced a doctor, how could anyone else’s mother possibly not want the same as they claimed their mother had. And you’re willing to trust this crew? Anyway, this one had come to town from Baltimore, where his father also was a doctor, and guess where in Baltimore — Johns Hopkins. Oh, yes, he was trained at Johns Hopkins. You want some bozo coming into YOUR mother’s room and trying to talk you into agreeing to her murder when you know damned well that she wants to live, in her hearing, HW? He even said, as if that would impress me, that he found that this hospital and Johns Hopkins were very similar. I rest my case, HW.
February 6th, 2010 | 2:35 pm
Oops, forgot, HW. Then there’s the late husband of my late mother’s late sister. He was an English professor who dropped dead in his early 40s of a heart attack on his way back from the Mayo Clinic which had just given him a complete cardiac evaluation and a completely clean bill of heath. His sister happened to be a doctor who was a cancer researcher. I remember being nine years old and standing in my parents’ kitchen telling her it was wrong to experiment on animals, and she just smiled indulgently. Well she died of cancer, and I never did miss her one bit. In fact I have this little habit of being glad when someone I don’t like dies, which I guess is part of my lack of Christianity or religious bent in general. Every time I see one of those pink or red ribbons or any mention of a “benefit” for “research” to ‘cure” something I’m disgusted. How about they show how the research is done, and then try to collect money to pay the careerists who do it?
February 6th, 2010 | 2:42 pm
In fact, it’s years of glorifying these careerists that led to the callousness of medicine and hospitals lawyers courts and the public being willing to murder Terri Schiavo, my mother, and others. That’s why we’ve got the death culture. I’ve wondered HW how you could be as nice a person as you seem to be and as smart as you are and not get it. Or for that matter how Wesley can be as nice and smart as he is and still not get it.
February 6th, 2010 | 2:51 pm
I’m not saying that Western medicine can’t do things, or that there aren’t doctors who are wonderful, to some of whom I’m grateful for what they’ve done for me, my late father, my late mother, and others dear to me. I’m saying that it’s a limited system that promotes arrogance, lack of logic, and callousness. And at a certain point even most of them who seemed better than the rest show the colors the system has engrained in them because they are at bottom no better than it is.
February 6th, 2010 | 3:00 pm
My eye just caught something in this blog section I’d missed — they used a ventilator to keep the pig’s lung alive, or some such thing. But they couldn’t keep a ventilator on my poor murdered mother, or others’ poor murdered mothers, or other elderly and disabled murdered people? Or a feeding tube in Terri Schiavo? Yet another example of why human exceptionalism, which endorses “scientific research,” is circular and self-defeating.
February 6th, 2010 | 3:30 pm
They kept the lung on a ventilator but won’t keep humans who want to live on one. Very nice, let’s all clap hands for scientific research and the good it does, no, it doesn’t breed callousness, it has nothing to do with the loss of ethics in society and medicine, and if you believe that I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Yet another example of the circular and self-defeating nature of human exceptionalism.
February 7th, 2010 | 3:24 pm
Proverbs 26:4
February 7th, 2010 | 11:06 pm
Ianthe: Sorry I triggered that avalanche. You seem to be having some really B-I-G issues with doctors.
BTW, I happen to think ophthalmologists are cool, especially since I’m scheduled for cataract surgery at 7am tomorrow. I’ll be off the site for a couple of days until things heal. See you all (I hope) on Wednesday.
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