Pigs could grow human organs in stem cell breakthrough ?

1. 35

   gettika15011993posted 13 years ago

   Pigs could grow human organs in stem cell breakthrough ?
   
   Human organs could be grown inside pigs for use in transplant operations following
   
   

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2. 61

   Max Purcellposted 13 years ago

   Notice while these mammals have similar enough make-up (warm-blooded, live-birthing, overlaps in design coding, etc.) to facilitate initiation and reproduction of the organic materials and human stem cell data for growth in the surrogate medium (pig), it still remains a matter of expertise in medical intervention to maintain by various artificial provisions and engineering the new part's functionality, if any, even when within the given simililarities of species within the same class (mammalian).  Your argument might bode better for your conclusion if it were the pig who were going to use the new organ.  A similar example to this would be a successful heart transplant, from a pig or orangutan, to a human.  But the degree of difficulty and level of intelligent manipulation required to enable or maintain the part's functionality and purposes of rejection, endurance, etc. decreases significantly once the part is transplanted into the medium for which it was designed (as in your example, human), and even then is still never eliminated completely and maintenance of functionality remains a task that requires personal attention.  (As we know, there is never any unit that functions as well, if at all, as when all of its parts conform perfectly to its design specs, right?)  And finally, your scenario, in any event, remains deficient to bridge the design differences between organisms that are not of the same class or even between those of the same class that do not parallel as closely.  The deficiency is simply easier to spot in the extreme examples of the drastic class differences, whereby we can see that the finding you mention actually has no impact on the interchangeability barrier pertaining to macro-evolution.
   
   Good stuff though and I enjoy the correspondence---Fun!  I have the follow this question button checked if this doesn't nail it down for anyone.  And please let me know anything further?
   
   MP

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3. 81

   Patty Inglish, MSposted 12 years ago

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4. 89

   JoyLevineposted 11 years ago

   It's interesting you should ask this question.  I recently wrote an article on developing spider silk through goat milk through gene manipulation.  I've been very interested in the research. 
   
   Then, recently I watched a program on the Science Channel where a  doctor is doing just this... only, not with pigs, but with sheep.  He has a farm and has been basically injecting sheep embryos with human stem cells and he has found that he can manipulate up to around 25-27%.  The idea, of course, is the same, growing organs for humans in need.
   
   There are some benefits and drawbacks and still a lot of unanswered questions.  Is 30% human match going to be better than 100% human match?  Who knows?
   I think there will still be a lot of the same problems that they go through now.
   
   The real question is, can they make it work enough?  If 30% is enough of a match and they go through the same amount of risk factors and rejection rates, that's still a success, considering there will be no more waiting lists and people dying by the wayside.  There will probably still be fatalities, and if they received a pig donor organ, I'm sure that will get blamed, even if it wasn't the full cause.
   
   It's an interesting question.  Kidneys can function on around 10% before they fail completely. So maybe 30% of a human organ is enough to make it work.  We'll have to wait and see.

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