Animal to Human Xenotransplantation Takes a Big Leap Forward
Scientists in Japan have used animal research to explore a potential way around the organ shortage by growing transplantable organs in sheep made from stem cells. In this case, it is monkey organs, but within a decade, it could be human organs. From the story:
Huddled at the back of her shed, bleating under a magnificent winter coat and tearing cheerfully at a bale of hay, she is possibly the answer to Japan's chronic national shortage of organ donors: a sheep with a revolutionary secret. Guided by one of the animal's lab-coated creators, the visitor's hand is led to the creature's underbelly and towards a spot in the middle under eight inches of greasy wool. Lurking there is a spare pancreas.This would not be xenotransplantation in the usual sense of the term, since the procured organ would not be the sheep's own, but as I understand it, would be a construct made from human stem cells:
The organ growing on the sheep was generated from monkey stem cells but the man behind the science, Yutaka Hanazono, believes that the technology could be developed eventually to make sheep into walking organ banks for human livers, hearts, pancreases and skin.I am assuming these are adult stem cells, since the type was not mentioned in the story, which generally means non embryonic. My attempts to find out otherwise were for naught. However, a scientist source I contacted told me, "Has to be ASC; they haven't formed much in the way of an actual organ, in lab or in body, with ESC." However, if I find out differently, I will let you all know. But even then, the IPSCs continue to come on strong, now having been made with blood cells.
So, if this works--always a big if in early research--a patient's adult stem cells could be used to grow a new organ in a sheep, which would then be transplanted back to the human when the time was right:
"We have made some very big advances here. There has historically been work on the potential of sheep as producers of human blood, but we are only slowly coming closer to the point where we can harvest sheep for human organs," Professor Hanazono told The Times. "We have shown that in vivo (in a living animal) creation of organs is more efficient than making them in vitro (in a test tube)... "So, to those animal rights types: Is it wrong to sacrifice sheep in order to literally save people?
Labels: Biotechnology. Stem Cell Research. Animal Research. Xenotransplantation.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 5:30 PM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
It better not be wrong for a Lamb to be sacrificed to literally save people - otherwise I'll be searching for a new vocation!
Ah, great comment--I agree! :)
I don't think it's wrong to eat animals, just as other animals eat other animals, or to use wool or leather (it would be sinful not to, having killed the animal for food). I find the rhetoric here a little suspicious, with the magnificent wool coat (as if someone had bought her a mink) and the "cheerfully" munching on hay (why is she "huddled at the back," though?) and all, but this doesn't bother me the way the rest of experimentation on non-human animals does -- if this is as bad as it gets with this stuff -- which I'm not sure it is.
It sure as hell is grotesque, though, isn't it, and if someone is going to grow me a new pancreas, I'd rather it be another human who did it voluntarily, or, better, that I had to grow it on my own body, using my own stem cells.
It doesn't seem as if it's going to cost this sheep her life, from what's here; it's not like cutting off a kitten's paws to see if the kitten will still try to groom itself, putting a baby monkey at the bottom of a stainless steel pit to see the effects of maternal deprivation and anguish, testing chemicals on animals, operating on dogs stolen from yards, bought from pounds, or bred for the purpose and putting them back in cages with concrete floors and no bedding to "recover" in agony, posting cages "do not feed" and "do not give water," deliberately giving primates head injuries, tying cats onto racks and leaving them for days and nights with their internal organs exposed in "elegant" experiments, paralyzing rats and seeing if they can be made to walk again, giving them tumors, "sacrificing" them at the end like trash -- well, read Hans Reusch's Slaughter of the Innocent. For the sake of researchers' careers and getting grants. Good cannot come out of that, and it doesn't. What comes out of it is the culture of death, medical callousness, etc. -- anyone with perception can see it in how doctors are, what goes on in hospitals and institutions, etc. We do it to animals because the results are potentially analogous in and helpful to humans, and then we wonder why humans are treated "like guinea pigs" and otherwise callously and life is no longer valued and doctors have abandoned the Hippocratic Oath? It's not that complicated. It's so simple that the point is getting missed.
Ianthe -
Don't forget about the monkey head transplants.
You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”
I don't disagree with all medical research on animals. Humans aren't the only ones who benefit from scientists learning how to battle bladder cancer in cats. Likewise, some animal research is done specifically for the benefit of animals. Research done on tigers allowed people to repair the damage of a tiger being de-clawed by self-centered jerks.
The majority of "psychological" studies on animals are on par with the atrocities the Japanese committed on their captives during World War II. I'm not saying that I equate the suffering of the animals exactly with the suffering of the humans, but that both groups were victims of unethical, unempathic, unsympathetic, and cold-hearted people who either loved the power that harming other beings gave them, or else were totally indifferent to anyone who wasn't them.
T.E.: I say, get rid of all the animal experimentation, all the psychology majors and related types, and 95 per cent of the researchers (just leave the ones bright enough not to experiment on animals). Very nice for the animals the research helps, but what about the ones it used? None of them had any say in it. As for the jerks who declawed the tiger, put them in jail and send the tiger in with its fangs for a visit, and let it be known that that was done, as a deterrent.
Wesley: I don't think it was wrong for the Greeks and Romans to sacrifice a sheep to the gods -- as long as they ate it, which they did. Of course, if they hadn't, Iphegenia, a human, would more likely have lived a lot longer. They call it "sacrificing" in laboratories. To WHAT? To WHOM? Science and scientists (or humans for that matter) are God? Just an excuse, and a lot of arrogance. At least the ancients had a skeptical, self-aware sense of humor about it, and burned the inedible parts for the gods after covering them up to make them look better, knowing full well that they were "tricking" the gods. We don't have that kind of intellectual elegance or sanity any more. We just have laboratories -- and it's the ancients who made the science, and without using lab animals. We should be ashamed of ourselves today.
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