A Chinese company, calling itself ‘the organ factory of the future,’ has humanized a pig through genetic engineering to enable a transplant performed on a brain-dead man
    • Lembot_0004@discuss.onlineEnglish
      13·
      16 days ago

      What was their reasoning? As I understand many such experiments are conducted on de facto dead people: they have a dead brain, but other organs are mostly intact and working.

      • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
        25·
        16 days ago

        The family reasoning? Probably just wanted for the patient to have peace or something along that. Imagine that they’d experiment on a (brain dead) person you care a lot.

        • Eheran@lemmy.worldEnglish
          20·
          16 days ago

          I would be honored to both participate in this myself and see my wife/kid help humanity so much instead of simply existing as a thing that has the shape etc. of a person but non of it’s defining characteristics.

          • wheezy@lemmy.mlEnglish
            14·
            16 days ago

            If it does actually happen to you. There will be a thought in your head that that person is still there somewhere and is potentially suffering. Your scientific reasoning and your “good for humanity” will likely not even cross your mind.

            All you’ll see is someone you love laying on a bed and not able to function. You won’t choose the experimental lung because you want to help humanity. You’ll do it because even if the doctors say “it will not bring them back” you are desperate for any hope of talking to them again or just seeing their eyes open so you can say goodbye.

            The family likely ended it to relieve their own emotional suffering with a false sense of hope. Along with the fear that what they were doing was prolonging the suffering of someone they loved very much.

            • Eheran@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              16 days ago

              Interesting that you want to know me better than myself. You are wrong in both that assumption and how/when I (don’t) think rational.

              Why did you unloaded this purely statistical assumption here anyway?

              • wheezy@lemmy.mlEnglish
                7·
                16 days ago

                What a robotic response to someone trying to explain love and losing a loved one to you.

                I’m not talking to someone that can’t understand empathy. Good luck with that.

                • dubyakay@lemmy.caEnglish
                  6·
                  16 days ago

                  I’m a survivor of my beloved who has died twice:

                  • Once when she had an asthma induced heart attack and her brain was without fresh oxygen for fifteen minutes. Her brain turned into complete mush, while retaining some minuscule bodily functions like breathing, defecation, pupilary reflex. “Persistent vegetative state” used to be the less apt description for it.
                  • Second time after she has succumbed to pneumonia while in hospice. Her mother, the only next of kin with sway over her fate, a religious nut job, kept her alive for four years.

                  Where I am trying to go with this is that false hope and selfishness is bad, and if I had the choice, nay SAY back then between keeping her alive or having lungs transplanted into her as an experiment that may establish the procedure to save someone’s life in the future, I’d have chosen the experiment every time.

                  I did not have a say in ending her absolutely pointless continued existence though. And she warned me about her mother’s selfishness and narcissism many times before her person as I knew her ceased to exist.

                  My point is that love is very much often a selfish act, as opposed to compassion, empathy or altruism. And people often make the wrong choices out of selfishness.