https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/mini-hearts-dish-big-win...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25329-5
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/03/building-heart-one...
Your best bet would probably be in advocating for the pigs to be engineered to prevent cortical development, ensuring they don’t become anything beyond twitching, unconscious organ bags. In many ways I think people would find this more disturbing, though.
It sounds high even for India. About 40% of Indians are vegetarian, a third if we exclude those who eat eggs [1]. The part of the country where vegetarianism is most rampant, the North, is also the highest dairy-consuming part of the country [2].
In any case, while medical veganism is something to think about, it's not worth prioritising until after we have reliable artificial organs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#India
[2] https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/there-is-a-scientific...
That's probably not a good move if we want to achieve a pragmatic reduction in meat consumption to help reduce related CO2 emissions. A smaller step is a much easier sell.
Which you should not, since eating eggs does not make a person a non-vegetarian. The only thing that makes a person a vegetarian is not eating animal flesh. Eggs and dairy are fair game; it's only vegans who push it farther and forbid those. This is basic stuff; has someone been trying to redefine "vegetarianism" recently?
> This is basic stuff; has someone been trying to redefine "vegetarianism" recently?
Oddly enough, when the word was introduced to popular use in English (though note that similar _concepts_ predated it), it usually meant something closer to what ‘vegan’ does today. The current use of the word is a 20th century thing. Words get redefined, all the time; that’s how languages work. Deal with it. In this case, the word has generally tended to be defined in _more_ permissive terms, not less.
Something a bacon lover never said ever . . .
I was raised as a pork lover but did stop as a teenager on my own a couple years before I quit beef. I think that did have a positive effect on my young health in the interim, but eventually everything was replaced by more comprehensive plant-based alternatives.
Still love the smell of bacon though.
Amazing times indeed, we are seeing xenografts and artificial organs in use.
From the outside, it looks like a race between figuring out the biocompatibility and power issues for total artificial hearts vs. figuring out the immunological issues for xenografts (pig hearts, mostly).
If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that the xenografts win. It doesn’t seem like we’ve made huge strides toward solving the power and durability requirements of total artificial hearts, while immunology advances are happening rapidly. Exciting times, nonetheless.