Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

Re:Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart b... by stult on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @11:02PM (#30081540)

> We deny people waiting for organ transplants medical treatment regularly. there simply aren't enough organs to go around.

Yeah. There is no shortage of pig organs which is kinda the whole point. Rationing limited care is different than denying perfectly available care simply out of retribution. I thought the context made that distinction rather self-evident.

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Re:Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart b... by BurningFrog on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:30AM (#30082123)

There is definitely a shortage of transplantable pig hearts. This is the first such heart ever.

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Re:Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart b... by krisoft on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:07AM (#30082337)

There is shortage yes in the sense that the heart didn’t come from just any pig. It is a specific, modified breed which made the procedure more likely to succeed. The donor pig was also probably raised in more sanitary conditions than most other pig would be.

There is not a huge supply of these transplantable pig hearts at the moment. But if the procedure proves to be viable and the long term consequences make it favourable we can scale up transplantable pig heart production.

The reason we are not transplanting pig hearts to thousands of patients right now is not because of any such supposed shortage though, but because the procedure is not proven yet. The experiment in question is set out to provide data to help answer that question.

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Re:Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart b... by BurningFrog on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:41PM (#30088754)

Yeah, I don't think we disagree about anything real.

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