How close are we to 3D printing the human heart?

Re:How close are we to 3D printing the human heart? by pazimzadeh on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @11:35PM (#20702377)

It's more than a little macabre, but hard to argue against if it does work. A few questions:

What if embodied cognition is a bigger deal than we think it is? i.e. i) To what degree do we need an active being to develop the various organs and ii) The uncephalized body might not be that dead

One of the alternatives is using animal organs (xenotransplantation), and we now have the ability to "humanize" them by genetically removing viruses and altering their immunogenicity to decrease the chances of rejection: https://www.egenesisbio.com/technology/

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Re:How close are we to 3D printing the human heart? by emiliobumachar on Thursday August 15, 2019 @06:24AM (#20703983)

If we will take the potential suffering of uncephalized humans seriously, it will be cognitively much harder to be as casual as we normally are with animal suffering.

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Re:How close are we to 3D printing the human heart? by aiscapehumanity on Thursday August 15, 2019 @09:36AM (#20705047)

I feel xenotransplants ethically eventually goes zero? A non cognitive shell is less sentient than a clinic rared animal with sharable organs. Xtransplants are a step up from food factory farming but doesnt do much for the rights of non-humans still.

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Re:How close are we to 3D printing the human heart? by pazimzadeh on Thursday August 15, 2019 @05:05PM (#20709664)

You don't keep the animal alive indefinitely in a questionably vegetative just to grow up its organs though - you let it roam about (likely in a caged and germ free, granted, but hopefully large, facility) and when the time comes to harvest the organ, you sacrifice the animal in a humane way.

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