I was thinking, big deal, didn't they do a pig heart transplant back in 1999?
Turns out that was a popular children's novel and TV series in the UK called "Pig Heart Boy", not reality. First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.
This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel.
I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.
Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.
It wasn't the entire heart but people have had things like valves transplanted from animals. Kevin Rudd had a bovine aortic valve transplanted back in 2011.
> First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.
That patient died shortly thereafter. The condition is critical and there's a lot of immunological pressure put on the patient.
China is smart to study this in living cadavers first. It's much easier to find patients that aren't already on death's door, and there is no need to keep the patient alive. You can run experiment after experiment.
Presumably people who are on the verge of death and beyond any kind of proven treatments. They're technically alive but have a very short predicted lifespan.
You can try a novel treatment on those but at the same time are limited by ethical concerns regarding pain and future survival (if the transplant "works", you are now in a tricky situation, as you can't easily do anything that has the potential to make the situation worse... and given it's uncharted territory, anything has the potential to make it worse).
Brain-dead people don't have such limitations. You don't have to worry about causing pain nor shortening potential survival, so you can try things that are likely to "kill" them (cause the transplant to fail, or other issues) and learn from the outcomes.
Agree with you on that. People can say that there is a procedure, but verifying that they are following it is another matter. Also curious as to the process for volunteering people for such experiments. Like if there is some paperwork that the family signs off on.
Very good point - I don't have an answer for that. But I'd say if there was a choice between killing a person who is very much alive and conscious by our current standards, and one who is "brain dead" by the same standards, I'd still pick the latter.
Part of it is a choice you make when choosing to donate your body for research. There's a chance brain death can be determined incorrectly (though in this situation it's likely the same determination will be used to withdraw life-support, research donation or not).
If I'm ever declared brain dead, I want scientists experimenting on me. That's a much better use than giving organs to just a handful of people. It pushes the salients forward for everyone.
TL;DR: NO, you won't be getting a pig lung anytime soon.
>However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant.
Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment.
The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients.
Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course.
That alone is insane, incredible. Hardly measures up to the ideal of leaving the hospital, good as new, but putting that aside: 18 days on a transplant, trans-species organ? I'm in awe!
There’s a lot of work going on to try and modify the DNA of the pigs to make them “transplant-compatible” using CRISPR, avoiding rejection and lifelong medication for the patient etc;
I’d love a hard sci-fi story where they implant chunks of pig brain into brain damaged humans, trying to maintain as much “life context” but bringing in new brain matter to help them function again.
Star Trek went into this a bit. There was an episode in which the technology behind the android Data's artificial brain had been turned into a medical treatment used to prolong the life of a recurring character who got injured, and the ethical question of the subplot was roughly "how much of their brain can you subsitute with functional but essentially generic hardware before they cease to be themselves, making the rescue attempt fruitless".
Most people will probably not remember this - it was the death of Kira's lover Bareil on DS9 - because it was almost throwaway, but it was one of those sparkling little ideas and questions Star Trek used to be filled with that has stayed with me life-long.
Not exactly what you asked for, but Alastair Reynolds have books with "hyperpigs" that are part-pig, part-human, likely bred to be replacement parts for humans.
I've been reading his novels, and I like the story of the pigs.
Genetically tweaked to be more compatible with the humans that might harvest their organs, but then they became a bit too human. Then scientists were like fuck it how far can we go with this. Hyperpigs.
Scorpio is not as interesting a character as I would like, but he's a good pig.
They were kind of developed, and then abandoned due to governments saving on research (not because they didn't work). Or at least one kind was: "organoids" (which is a play on that they could be grown in any form, so some student decided to print a kind of alien-shaped almost-kidney, which then led to an article ... plus when used people want a flat relatively thin shape)
They are extensively used in pharmacological research because they match real organs very well on the cellular level. But there is further research necessary to implement the large scale parts. E.g. in kidneys the actual kidney and the connection to the gall bladder forms separately and is then combined into an organ. That doesn't work, yet.
And in some cases nobody has the courage to actually use it. The list of reasons why a liver organoid couldn't be implanted into a live patient is growing very thin. Well, aside from funding (which is massive if it fails, at least the equivalent of a year's pay. 3 or 4 times a year's pay for a doctoral student).
I would like to point out that this research isn't especially badly treated. It has fared better than most programs. But it probably can't even be saved. The actual defunding happened 5 years ago and last year even the PI has moved on, and every doctoral student involved also has. I'm sure they'll answer questions on the subject if you ask, but you'll have to rebuild things from papers and email questions. There is a spinoff selling organoids to pharma, but tiny ones (think clusters of x0000 cells). If the research in scaling organoids to full sizes is restarted now, you can't really expect results the first year, maybe two at least.
Color printers need color inks for tracking dots. Get a laser, they're clog free as a bonus.
If your printer is already severely clogged and that is a major contributor to chronic ink level issues for your printer, apply few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto each of ink drawing ports(do NOT use acetone and/or ethanol; liquid form PFAS is better in narrow technical sense, IIRC). It will dissolve everything unwanted and its positive effects seem to last years, while being effectively harmless to electro-mechanical systems.
Good question. No, because there is a fiqh (jurisprudence) rule that roughly states “necessities permit the prohibited”, which can be used to override the impurity of pigs.
In addition, some scholars (a minority) argue that perhaps one reason behind pork consumption being forbidden is due to its utility in human transplantation (thereby making it “sacred”).
In the 1920s, Voronoff advocated the transplantation of slices of chimpanzee testis into aged men whose “zest for life” was deteriorating, believing that the hormones produced by the testis would rejuvenate his patients.
Oh, this argument was definitely put forth after the fact. But the idea is that the utility of pigs must have been known to God, so perhaps this is a reason behind forbidding its consumption.
> He has only forbidden you ˹to eat˺ carrion, blood, swine[1], and what is slaughtered in the name of any other than Allah. But if someone is compelled by necessity—neither driven by desire nor exceeding immediate need—they will not be sinful. Surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
[1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8.
On the Jewish side of things there's a principle called "Pikuach Nefesh" which essentially means that outside of extremes like murder, rape, and other violent crimes against others, you should do anything possible to preserve life. If you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath and help.
A friend of mine lives in Montreal where there is a large orthodox Jewish population and he told me he was out walking one day and a woman started calling to him from the door of her house and gesturing for him to come over. She explained to him that she needed his help: there was an urgent situation and she needed to make a phone call, but because it was the Sabbath, she was not able to. He made the call for her and went on his way.
I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
Generalizing a lot here, but Jews and Christians interpret ambiguities within scripture very differently. Most Christians will try to maintain the spirit of the rule. Jews often view ambiguities as loopholes intentionally left by God. If the loophole wasn't mean to be there, God would have written it differently.
For a great example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv . Look carefully and you'll see these in Jewish areas of NYC like Williamsburg.
> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules?
Apparently, the consensus is that the God does not just approve of working around the rules, but actively _expects_ it. Otherwise the rules wouldn't have these loopholes, would they?
That sounds profoundly ignorant of human’s customs and cultural usages. Using "we" shows the orator includes himself in the group but the surprised tone "my god" has a bitter taste of despise.
I’m not Jewish but it’s easy to see similar mental gymnastics on myself or around. Remarking it on others before myself would show a great lack of introspection. When someone is surprised, the wise thinking is to question his own beliefs before the object of his discovery.
Which of my beliefs am I meant to question? That maybe there does exist an all-poweful, all-knowing being to whom it is somehow important that humans do not perform specific menial tasks on specific days of the week, since a lot of people seem to believe this?
> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
There's a lot of crossover between Judaism and DnD player mentality. You're very much encouraged to learn the source material, the commentary and to discuss and debate it. Workarounds don't actually break the rules; and you need to put a lot of study into doing them properly.
Sometimes you need to take a sensible decision and choose to just flat out break the rules. In those situations one is encouraged to do so in an uncommon or abnormal way so it doesn't become habitual. This makes sense to me - I didn't smoke inside for the first 3 years of moving into my house, but the first time I did break that rule it made breaking it much easier the second, third, or subsequent times.
In your example given I can see a situation that isn't actually a risk to life (which comes under different rulings), but is still serious enough you need to take some action before waiting for Shabbat to end. A burst pipe would be a good example; it's not going to kill anyone but it could cause extremely serious damage if left. Asking for help rather than just picking the phone up and treating it like a regular day sorta makes logical sense in that context, though it's probably not what I'd choose to do.
Jewish laws only ever apply to Jews [1]; they have no expectation, want or desire for it to apply to anyone else, through conversion or otherwise. If your friend isn't Jewish then he's welcome to do what he wants. There is no damnation in the Christian sense for anyone, Jewish or otherwise. It's also possible to get into Jewish heaven without being Jewish, but you do have to obey a small subset [1] of the laws.
3d printing is not the approach that will yield organs. My money is on the work Michael Levin is doing on bioelectronics, where you essentially “command” (/convince) cells to turn into the organ you need by talking with them in cellular electronic language.
My mind-reading senses tell me parent might be thinking about the scaffolding approach where you show cells the vague outlines of a lung or heart in the form of an extracellular matrix and then they go "hmm, we are building a heart then".
Well yeah, but it's plausible that this is easier to get working. If we can get animal organs working, then we can save lives while we figure out how to print/clone human organs.
Great! I am also about to donate my other kidney. The difference in the long term outcome of the patient between living and dead donation is significant enough for me to go through this. My total kidney function will drop to 50% and I will be sick for 2-3 weeks but if everything goes well I will be up to 70% after few months if the remaining kidney accomodates and back to work in about 4 weeks. Of course there are some other long term risks to consider. However, I probably would not agree on this if there was an abundant supply of working pig kidneys…
It is easier to agree to donate your lungs because ethically they're only going to take your lungs if you die. So then you don't care anyway. If you agree to donate a kidney they may ask when you're alive, because you have two kidneys and you can survive (though with some reduction in capability) with just one. This is called Living Kidney Donation, you don't have to offer to do this, and even if you offer, and it's a match you don't have to go through with the donation but obviously there are huge psychological impacts from deciding to perhaps save somebody's life as a conscious choice at a non-negligible risk to your own.
Note that you're not "saving somebody's life" by donating a kidney. What you are doing, at best, is increasing their quality of life and even that is hard to quantify:
Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease. There are also risks, including the risks of surgery. After the transplant, you will need to take anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, for as long as your new kidney is working, which can have side effects. You will have a higher risk for infections and certain types of cancer.
Although most transplants are successful and last for many years, how long they last can vary from one person to the next. Depending on your age, many people will need more than one kidney transplant during a lifetime.
The majority of kidney patients with end-stage kidney disease do not simply die: they can survive several years on dialysis. As far as I can tell, most indeed do: only a minority of kidney patients ever get transplants.
Source: relative with kidney disease who would not accept a living donour kidney because of ethical concerns.
A friend had kidney failure and now has one of her husband's kidneys. It's really striking how much the immunosuppression sucks (a lot!) versus how much dialysis sucked (far more) for the period between her diagnosis and them being able to perform a transplant.
The US has a problem where there are a bunch of outfits whose income is derived specifically from dialysis, so for them transplants are bad business. Sure, the patient will (statistically) have a longer life and enjoy higher quality of life, but their income will be reduced so...
This results in a rather... muted endorsement of qualitatively better outcomes and where there's obviously also going to be an ethical component I'd say that's undesirable.
We all die. People with kidney disease die significantly sooner statistically if they do not receive a transplant, so this is the sense in which I mean saving a life.
But that's not "saving someone's life". Try it like this:
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
And note that while dialysis is big business and I have no doubt that the people who are in it care far more about their profits than their patients, so are transplants. In fact transplants cost a lot more and make people a lot more money than dialysis and the only reason they're not as big business as dialysis is that there's just not enough donours, which makes a big honking red financial incentive to keep pushing for everyone to become a donour.
Meanwhile, like the National Kidney Foundation says, in my quote above, 'Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease' and neither does dialysis. And because both treatments keep patients alive for longer than the typical five-year horizon of medical follow-up studies, they, both together, reduce the incentive to work on real "cures" of kidney disease (which, like cancer, is not one condition but many) which would make the sucking of dialysis and transplant both things of the past.
And I know this last one because I personally asked my relative's nephrologist and transplant surgeon about it and they were vague and hand-wavy, like "oh, sure, there's people working on that sort of thing somewhere".
But nobody's really trying because we can make millions keeping people tied up to machines or on immunosuppression until they give up the spirit and so who cares?
"Oh I didn't actually save the little old ladies when their nursing home burned down. I just made their life a bit easier for a little while, they still all died because they were human"
Nobody talks like this. It is understood that humans are mortal.
Yes, necessarily kidney disease cure research gets you fewer QALYs than figuring out a way to cure something we have no treatment for. But given we haven't eradicated polio it's not as though humans are very good at this whole cost-benefit analysis when it comes to medicine.
Are you implying that this makes the host sick or dead or that this somehow leads to pathogens jumping to humans that otherwise wouldn’t have? This is a last resort so I’m not sure how it matters in the former case, and the latter seems like a stretch to me as a lay person.
I was thinking, big deal, didn't they do a pig heart transplant back in 1999? Turns out that was a popular children's novel and TV series in the UK called "Pig Heart Boy", not reality. First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.
This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel.
I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.
Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.
There are a few docked cruise ships run as hotels, where they're so docked it would be hard to undock, but not run aground.
It wasn't the entire heart but people have had things like valves transplanted from animals. Kevin Rudd had a bovine aortic valve transplanted back in 2011.
> First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.
That patient died shortly thereafter. The condition is critical and there's a lot of immunological pressure put on the patient.
China is smart to study this in living cadavers first. It's much easier to find patients that aren't already on death's door, and there is no need to keep the patient alive. You can run experiment after experiment.
I'm almost afraid to ask, what are living cadavers?
Brain death without cardiac death.
Presumably people who are on the verge of death and beyond any kind of proven treatments. They're technically alive but have a very short predicted lifespan.
You can try a novel treatment on those but at the same time are limited by ethical concerns regarding pain and future survival (if the transplant "works", you are now in a tricky situation, as you can't easily do anything that has the potential to make the situation worse... and given it's uncharted territory, anything has the potential to make it worse).
Brain-dead people don't have such limitations. You don't have to worry about causing pain nor shortening potential survival, so you can try things that are likely to "kill" them (cause the transplant to fail, or other issues) and learn from the outcomes.
> Brain-dead people don't have such limitations. You don't have to worry about causing pain
Fortunately determining brain death is a problem with a clear-cut answer with a clear line dividing “brain death” and “not brain death”. Right?
No, but you can measure pain response, and predict pretty well if they ever wake up, so well enough for this.
Actually it’s less the science of it that concerns me, but whether procedures will be rigorously followed.
Agree with you on that. People can say that there is a procedure, but verifying that they are following it is another matter. Also curious as to the process for volunteering people for such experiments. Like if there is some paperwork that the family signs off on.
And in China they can just decide they will never wake up regardless.
Very good point - I don't have an answer for that. But I'd say if there was a choice between killing a person who is very much alive and conscious by our current standards, and one who is "brain dead" by the same standards, I'd still pick the latter.
Part of it is a choice you make when choosing to donate your body for research. There's a chance brain death can be determined incorrectly (though in this situation it's likely the same determination will be used to withdraw life-support, research donation or not).
This is what holds us back.
If I'm ever declared brain dead, I want scientists experimenting on me. That's a much better use than giving organs to just a handful of people. It pushes the salients forward for everyone.
I mean for experimental organ transplants we could literally do both though.
Not that shortly, the patient lived about two months.
Ha this blew my mind, I was sure that this was real
It was tried earlier by Religa in 1987, but the experiment was a failure AFAIK.
Porkin' Across America was prophetic
That series messed me up when I was younger.
TL;DR: NO, you won't be getting a pig lung anytime soon.
>However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant.
Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment.
The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients.
Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course.
First heart transplant lived for 18 days post-op, it has to start somewhere.
That alone is insane, incredible. Hardly measures up to the ideal of leaving the hospital, good as new, but putting that aside: 18 days on a transplant, trans-species organ? I'm in awe!
18 days is how long the first human-to-human heart transplant recipient lived post-op. The more recent first pig heart recipient made it two months.
And keep in mind people who get these organs are very very ill
There’s a lot of work going on to try and modify the DNA of the pigs to make them “transplant-compatible” using CRISPR, avoiding rejection and lifelong medication for the patient etc;
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan4187
I’d love a hard sci-fi story where they implant chunks of pig brain into brain damaged humans, trying to maintain as much “life context” but bringing in new brain matter to help them function again.
Star Trek went into this a bit. There was an episode in which the technology behind the android Data's artificial brain had been turned into a medical treatment used to prolong the life of a recurring character who got injured, and the ethical question of the subplot was roughly "how much of their brain can you subsitute with functional but essentially generic hardware before they cease to be themselves, making the rescue attempt fruitless".
Most people will probably not remember this - it was the death of Kira's lover Bareil on DS9 - because it was almost throwaway, but it was one of those sparkling little ideas and questions Star Trek used to be filled with that has stayed with me life-long.
A great take on the Ship of Theseus.
I think our neurons are actually different in significant ways, might be more accurate and interesting for them to use brain organoids.
Not exactly what you asked for, but Alastair Reynolds have books with "hyperpigs" that are part-pig, part-human, likely bred to be replacement parts for humans.
I've been reading his novels, and I like the story of the pigs.
Genetically tweaked to be more compatible with the humans that might harvest their organs, but then they became a bit too human. Then scientists were like fuck it how far can we go with this. Hyperpigs.
Scorpio is not as interesting a character as I would like, but he's a good pig.
What happened to the 3d printed organs I was promised a decade ago?
They were kind of developed, and then abandoned due to governments saving on research (not because they didn't work). Or at least one kind was: "organoids" (which is a play on that they could be grown in any form, so some student decided to print a kind of alien-shaped almost-kidney, which then led to an article ... plus when used people want a flat relatively thin shape)
They are extensively used in pharmacological research because they match real organs very well on the cellular level. But there is further research necessary to implement the large scale parts. E.g. in kidneys the actual kidney and the connection to the gall bladder forms separately and is then combined into an organ. That doesn't work, yet.
And in some cases nobody has the courage to actually use it. The list of reasons why a liver organoid couldn't be implanted into a live patient is growing very thin. Well, aside from funding (which is massive if it fails, at least the equivalent of a year's pay. 3 or 4 times a year's pay for a doctoral student).
I would like to point out that this research isn't especially badly treated. It has fared better than most programs. But it probably can't even be saved. The actual defunding happened 5 years ago and last year even the PI has moved on, and every doctoral student involved also has. I'm sure they'll answer questions on the subject if you ask, but you'll have to rebuild things from papers and email questions. There is a spinoff selling organoids to pharma, but tiny ones (think clusters of x0000 cells). If the research in scaling organoids to full sizes is restarted now, you can't really expect results the first year, maybe two at least.
It isn't just the US that is defunding science.
Low on cyan.
But I'm just printing black-and-white organs!
Color printers need color inks for tracking dots. Get a laser, they're clog free as a bonus.
If your printer is already severely clogged and that is a major contributor to chronic ink level issues for your printer, apply few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto each of ink drawing ports(do NOT use acetone and/or ethanol; liquid form PFAS is better in narrow technical sense, IIRC). It will dissolve everything unwanted and its positive effects seem to last years, while being effectively harmless to electro-mechanical systems.
I can't imagine the red tape this research would have had to deal with in America.
China is doing amazing work.
Of course it failed, but it's one step in a long journey.
They had four different assessments and written permission from family plus a braindead patient.
Red tape aplenty.
odd comment, the US is at the forefront of pig organ transplants?
There was no life saving here. This was performed in a brain dead person simply to determine the science outcomes.
The brain dead person was used as a living experiment, and they were watching for immunological response.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have never read of this happening in the US. There's far too much red tape.
You need to update your priors or assign less confidence to them. A pig heart transplant was completed (successfully) in the US a few years ago: https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2022/university-of-...
You're not reading my comment. Go back and read it again.
My entire point is that China is experimenting on BRAIN DEAD living bodies as test tubes.
This is a way to accelerate much faster since there are far more brain dead patients and no effort needs to be made to keep the patient alive.
They're effectively using these bodies as lab experiments. It's an incredibly smart move by China.
Without the red tape and with an endless stream of brain dead bodies, they're going to leapfrog America quickly with this technology.
you’re wrong, but i won’t dispute the central notion that the regulatory environment is tougher in the US https://sciencemediacentre.es/en/reactions-kidney-transplant...
Seinfield had an episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALpcxliWLeI
Pigman!
ah project Pigoon
Would it be considered haram even if you don't actually eat it?
Good question. No, because there is a fiqh (jurisprudence) rule that roughly states “necessities permit the prohibited”, which can be used to override the impurity of pigs.
In addition, some scholars (a minority) argue that perhaps one reason behind pork consumption being forbidden is due to its utility in human transplantation (thereby making it “sacred”).
How recently were the arguments around utility in human transplantation put forward? Are religious scholars the OG biotech founders?
Good paper on the history of human/animal transplantation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3246856/
In the 1920s, Voronoff advocated the transplantation of slices of chimpanzee testis into aged men whose “zest for life” was deteriorating, believing that the hormones produced by the testis would rejuvenate his patients.
Oh, this argument was definitely put forth after the fact. But the idea is that the utility of pigs must have been known to God, so perhaps this is a reason behind forbidding its consumption.
[flagged]
> He has only forbidden you ˹to eat˺ carrion, blood, swine[1], and what is slaughtered in the name of any other than Allah. But if someone is compelled by necessity—neither driven by desire nor exceeding immediate need—they will not be sinful. Surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
[1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8.
https://quran.com/2?startingVerse=173
On the Jewish side of things there's a principle called "Pikuach Nefesh" which essentially means that outside of extremes like murder, rape, and other violent crimes against others, you should do anything possible to preserve life. If you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath and help.
>if you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath
are you therefore required to answer the phone, because who else would be calling on shabat?
A friend of mine lives in Montreal where there is a large orthodox Jewish population and he told me he was out walking one day and a woman started calling to him from the door of her house and gesturing for him to come over. She explained to him that she needed his help: there was an urgent situation and she needed to make a phone call, but because it was the Sabbath, she was not able to. He made the call for her and went on his way.
I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
Generalizing a lot here, but Jews and Christians interpret ambiguities within scripture very differently. Most Christians will try to maintain the spirit of the rule. Jews often view ambiguities as loopholes intentionally left by God. If the loophole wasn't mean to be there, God would have written it differently.
For a great example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv . Look carefully and you'll see these in Jewish areas of NYC like Williamsburg.
I like the argument that God of course knows all the loopholes, so left them around as Easter eggs for us to find and is proud when we do.
> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules?
Apparently, the consensus is that the God does not just approve of working around the rules, but actively _expects_ it. Otherwise the rules wouldn't have these loopholes, would they?
My god, the mental gymnastics we do so we can continue to pretend comforting things are true...
Every tradition is spontaneous, thus idiosyncratic.
That sounds profoundly ignorant of human’s customs and cultural usages. Using "we" shows the orator includes himself in the group but the surprised tone "my god" has a bitter taste of despise.
I’m not Jewish but it’s easy to see similar mental gymnastics on myself or around. Remarking it on others before myself would show a great lack of introspection. When someone is surprised, the wise thinking is to question his own beliefs before the object of his discovery.
Which of my beliefs am I meant to question? That maybe there does exist an all-poweful, all-knowing being to whom it is somehow important that humans do not perform specific menial tasks on specific days of the week, since a lot of people seem to believe this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbos_goy
Had an orthodox roommate in college who once asked me to light his bowl for him...
Another time he asked my friend to tear him some toilet paper
Yahveh is the god of the Jews. Other nations should obey their own respective gods - presumably Odin for people of Anglo-Saxon descent.
> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
There's a lot of crossover between Judaism and DnD player mentality. You're very much encouraged to learn the source material, the commentary and to discuss and debate it. Workarounds don't actually break the rules; and you need to put a lot of study into doing them properly.
Sometimes you need to take a sensible decision and choose to just flat out break the rules. In those situations one is encouraged to do so in an uncommon or abnormal way so it doesn't become habitual. This makes sense to me - I didn't smoke inside for the first 3 years of moving into my house, but the first time I did break that rule it made breaking it much easier the second, third, or subsequent times.
In your example given I can see a situation that isn't actually a risk to life (which comes under different rulings), but is still serious enough you need to take some action before waiting for Shabbat to end. A burst pipe would be a good example; it's not going to kill anyone but it could cause extremely serious damage if left. Asking for help rather than just picking the phone up and treating it like a regular day sorta makes logical sense in that context, though it's probably not what I'd choose to do.
Jewish laws only ever apply to Jews [1]; they have no expectation, want or desire for it to apply to anyone else, through conversion or otherwise. If your friend isn't Jewish then he's welcome to do what he wants. There is no damnation in the Christian sense for anyone, Jewish or otherwise. It's also possible to get into Jewish heaven without being Jewish, but you do have to obey a small subset [1] of the laws.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
no, but if you have a pager, you would.
How strongly is this principal followed?
The current Israeli administration is governed by hard line Jewish leaders and don’t seem to abide by pikachu at all.
Why not all vegan then
Because the exception is for saving identifiable, individual human lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh
[dead]
My brain autocorrected that to Pikachu and I had a moment of perplexment.
Dead in less than a year.
9 days is definitely less than a year
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3d printing is not the approach that will yield organs. My money is on the work Michael Levin is doing on bioelectronics, where you essentially “command” (/convince) cells to turn into the organ you need by talking with them in cellular electronic language.
My mind-reading senses tell me parent might be thinking about the scaffolding approach where you show cells the vague outlines of a lung or heart in the form of an extracellular matrix and then they go "hmm, we are building a heart then".
If I remember correctly you need both. Program the cells to be X organ cells, and provide a scaffold for them to grow on.
that seems like a way harder problem than convincing your body not to kill the pig organ
I'd take it over dying. (Not that this technology is actually at a stage where it could prevent that, but neither are whole 3D printed lungs.)
Then you’ll need to wait
Well yeah, but it's plausible that this is easier to get working. If we can get animal organs working, then we can save lives while we figure out how to print/clone human organs.
If you really needed a lung you would take what you could get.
The danger of xeonozoonsis outweighs the benefits of cross species organ transplants for humans
That's easy to say if you don't need an organ. And the dangers are mostly theoretical at this point.
Perhaps you then consider donating your kidney?
Yes, I am an organ donor like many others. There are also other paths that doesn’t give pathogens opportunities to infect cross species
Great! I am also about to donate my other kidney. The difference in the long term outcome of the patient between living and dead donation is significant enough for me to go through this. My total kidney function will drop to 50% and I will be sick for 2-3 weeks but if everything goes well I will be up to 70% after few months if the remaining kidney accomodates and back to work in about 4 weeks. Of course there are some other long term risks to consider. However, I probably would not agree on this if there was an abundant supply of working pig kidneys…
You’re still ignoring the risk of exposing humanity to new novel infections.
This is about lungs?
It is easier to agree to donate your lungs because ethically they're only going to take your lungs if you die. So then you don't care anyway. If you agree to donate a kidney they may ask when you're alive, because you have two kidneys and you can survive (though with some reduction in capability) with just one. This is called Living Kidney Donation, you don't have to offer to do this, and even if you offer, and it's a match you don't have to go through with the donation but obviously there are huge psychological impacts from deciding to perhaps save somebody's life as a conscious choice at a non-negligible risk to your own.
Note that you're not "saving somebody's life" by donating a kidney. What you are doing, at best, is increasing their quality of life and even that is hard to quantify:
Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease. There are also risks, including the risks of surgery. After the transplant, you will need to take anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, for as long as your new kidney is working, which can have side effects. You will have a higher risk for infections and certain types of cancer.
Although most transplants are successful and last for many years, how long they last can vary from one person to the next. Depending on your age, many people will need more than one kidney transplant during a lifetime.
https://www.kidney.org/kidney-topics/kidney-transplant
The majority of kidney patients with end-stage kidney disease do not simply die: they can survive several years on dialysis. As far as I can tell, most indeed do: only a minority of kidney patients ever get transplants.
Source: relative with kidney disease who would not accept a living donour kidney because of ethical concerns.
A friend had kidney failure and now has one of her husband's kidneys. It's really striking how much the immunosuppression sucks (a lot!) versus how much dialysis sucked (far more) for the period between her diagnosis and them being able to perform a transplant.
The US has a problem where there are a bunch of outfits whose income is derived specifically from dialysis, so for them transplants are bad business. Sure, the patient will (statistically) have a longer life and enjoy higher quality of life, but their income will be reduced so...
This results in a rather... muted endorsement of qualitatively better outcomes and where there's obviously also going to be an ethical component I'd say that's undesirable.
We all die. People with kidney disease die significantly sooner statistically if they do not receive a transplant, so this is the sense in which I mean saving a life.
But that's not "saving someone's life". Try it like this:
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
And note that while dialysis is big business and I have no doubt that the people who are in it care far more about their profits than their patients, so are transplants. In fact transplants cost a lot more and make people a lot more money than dialysis and the only reason they're not as big business as dialysis is that there's just not enough donours, which makes a big honking red financial incentive to keep pushing for everyone to become a donour.
Meanwhile, like the National Kidney Foundation says, in my quote above, 'Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease' and neither does dialysis. And because both treatments keep patients alive for longer than the typical five-year horizon of medical follow-up studies, they, both together, reduce the incentive to work on real "cures" of kidney disease (which, like cancer, is not one condition but many) which would make the sucking of dialysis and transplant both things of the past.
And I know this last one because I personally asked my relative's nephrologist and transplant surgeon about it and they were vague and hand-wavy, like "oh, sure, there's people working on that sort of thing somewhere".
But nobody's really trying because we can make millions keeping people tied up to machines or on immunosuppression until they give up the spirit and so who cares?
"Oh I didn't actually save the little old ladies when their nursing home burned down. I just made their life a bit easier for a little while, they still all died because they were human"
Nobody talks like this. It is understood that humans are mortal.
Yes, necessarily kidney disease cure research gets you fewer QALYs than figuring out a way to cure something we have no treatment for. But given we haven't eradicated polio it's not as though humans are very good at this whole cost-benefit analysis when it comes to medicine.
How?
Pathogens will infect cross species via these organ implants.
Are you implying that this makes the host sick or dead or that this somehow leads to pathogens jumping to humans that otherwise wouldn’t have? This is a last resort so I’m not sure how it matters in the former case, and the latter seems like a stretch to me as a lay person.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7150069/
It’s not a stretch
I had no idea, til, ty.