Agreed. There are a lot of people working on this, it's too bad that they only mentioned one group. My mother is working with a competing group (J. Craig Venter and Martine Rothblatt):
People have gotten pig parts implanted for a while. Donor organs are far more complex than past successes, but it's not a binary 0 success to 1 pig organs.
Heart valves from pigs are a pretty standard thing and have been used for a couple of decades. So that's something. There are clearly a lot of problems to be worked out but I don't know that anything is really insurmountable, so it ought to "just" be a matter of putting in lots of work.
Gunuine Question: Isn't our current life expectancy good enough? i.e. 65 years... Why cant we put more resources on quality life like eradicating cast, relegion and create free world and target towards one country one world.... rather than miserable life for 120years?
No, current life expectancy is nowhere near good enough! Death is terrible, and it's weird to me how accepting people are of it. I guess because we have no choice, but even so. We go through our lives constantly losing friends and loved ones for no reason aside from the fact that our bodies were designed by a brainless process.
The other goals you mention don't strike me as the sort of thing which merely need more resources to be solved.
Last year I wrote a paper on Oryx and Crake and found a case of using slightly modified pig membranes/ligaments to repair human ones...We're just getting closer to OrganInc.
Pigs age about 5 times faster than humans. Wouldn't pig organs age 5 times faster than humans also? That might be one more thing you needed to tinker in pig DNA. Make pigs (or at least the target organs) long lived.
All this tinkering begs the question: Which is easier, tinker pig DNA to make pigs compatible with humans, or tinker human DNA to make humans with pig-like-brains that grow fast enough to be used as organ source? Does it ethically make any difference?
What if we could grow human bodies with no consciousness what so ever (this might not be even super hard, or require DNA tinkering, just damage the fetus where appropriate brain parts are about to develop), wouldn't that be the most humane option? Since we wouldn't be killing anything, but hunk of human meat that never had a conscious thought...
Considering how hard of a time Planned Parenthood is having right now providing fetal tissue to researchers, the regulatory landscape doesn't look good for anything that involves using humans as an organ source.
And modifying pig DNA to make them compatible with humans is indeed proving to be very doable.
To eradicate these viruses, Dr. Church and his team engineered a new set of genes and inserted them into pig cells. The genes produced enzymes that hunted for PERVs and snipped out bits of the viral DNA
So the genes were put in some cells that then created the enzymes that actually had the CRISPR/cas9 mechanisms? If so, that's clever. I had imagined that the CRISPR was delivered more directly and I was wondering how you could ensure delivery of CRISPR to all cells in the tissue. With a gene that actually produces an enzyme that delivers CRISPR, the treatment would continue in the cells until the gene was disabled.
What would really be interesting is to have the CRISPR edit include the gene that created the enzyme so that it could recursively deliver the treatment. Of course I wouldn't think that we'd want a recursive treatment like that in an eventual solution... but it would be interesting.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 71.3 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_in_Revelation_Space#Pigs
(not really horror)
:)
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540076/surgeons-smash-r... http://medschool.umaryland.edu/facultyresearchprofile/viewpr...
I think you wait until people survive early trials to call it real.
https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom/factsheets/Organ-Donati...
The other goals you mention don't strike me as the sort of thing which merely need more resources to be solved.
Last year I wrote a paper on Oryx and Crake and found a case of using slightly modified pig membranes/ligaments to repair human ones...We're just getting closer to OrganInc.
I'm not sure if maybe Atwood already knew this to be the case, but it seems like quite the coincidence.
All this tinkering begs the question: Which is easier, tinker pig DNA to make pigs compatible with humans, or tinker human DNA to make humans with pig-like-brains that grow fast enough to be used as organ source? Does it ethically make any difference?
What if we could grow human bodies with no consciousness what so ever (this might not be even super hard, or require DNA tinkering, just damage the fetus where appropriate brain parts are about to develop), wouldn't that be the most humane option? Since we wouldn't be killing anything, but hunk of human meat that never had a conscious thought...
And modifying pig DNA to make them compatible with humans is indeed proving to be very doable.
Source: my mother works in this field. http://medschool.umaryland.edu/facultyresearchprofile/viewpr....
So the genes were put in some cells that then created the enzymes that actually had the CRISPR/cas9 mechanisms? If so, that's clever. I had imagined that the CRISPR was delivered more directly and I was wondering how you could ensure delivery of CRISPR to all cells in the tissue. With a gene that actually produces an enzyme that delivers CRISPR, the treatment would continue in the cells until the gene was disabled.
What would really be interesting is to have the CRISPR edit include the gene that created the enzyme so that it could recursively deliver the treatment. Of course I wouldn't think that we'd want a recursive treatment like that in an eventual solution... but it would be interesting.