Ethics of taking a pig's heart for transplant

I'm sure the recipient of the organ, now alive and well, is as happy as a pig in **** about its success. That's all that matters.

If anyone complains about using pig organs, to then proceed to horse into some bacon sandwich later (or any other animal sourced food), I can't forgive their hypocrisy.

People should keep their religious views to themselves.

"I disagree with pig heart transplants".......fair enough, then, don't have a pig heart transplant if you need one. Same goes for marrying gay people and about 5 million other things.

A good chunk of the world don’t eat pork because it’s ‘unclean’ but can do if it’s a matter of starvation. Presumably this means they would also be happy with donor organs if it’s a matter of life and death.

They are free to express themselves alright, but nobody is obliged to listen to it or even acknowledge it. And I'm equally as free to tell them to shut it.

It is the very fact that they are "spreading the teachings and all else of that religion" which gets people's backs up. Nobody wants to hear that crap coming from such a downright disgusting and evil organisation as the RCC in Ireland.

Imagine pontificating about the rights and wrongs of the human body when you were an integral part of the mass murder of children and their bodies. Demonising women for "straying from the path" as you sell their kids to wealthy Americans and pocketing the cash. Complicit in covering up the rampant sexual abuse of society's most vulnerable souls, to the point where you moved them along to a fresh batch of kids in the next parish over in order to save your own embarrassment.

This week alone, the Pope was chastising everyone, not just Catholics, mind, but everyone for not having kids. Why isn't he doing his part? Why doesn't he have kids? Why doesn't he issue a papal decree to allow priests to have kids?

The church, in fact all organised religions, are free to express whatever they want. And we are free to tell them to go fook themselves with a ball of rusty barbed wire, cos I'll be damned (literally) if I'll be lectured on the moral rights and wrongs of such a bunch of scumbags.

You disagree with Voltaire then?

Only briefly looked over the story myself so apologies if I get the details wrong. But as I understand it:

1) Pigs are used because - surprisingly enough - their hearts are more similar to ours than Chimps and other primates. And the heart in pigs grow to the required size much faster too. 6 months I think is the required time to get it to the size required.

2) There was 10 genetic modifications done to the pig DNA as follows:

3) 4 of these were knocking out genes from the pig DNA - especially one which encodes for a particular molecule known to be a main player in rejection.

4) 1 of these 4 was a growth gene which was knocked out to prevent the heart growing any more inside the human after implantation.

5) The 6 other changes were human genes inserted into the Genome of the pig DNA. All of the modifications that I can see are related to making the heart more friendly to the human immune system response.

6) Interestingly the transplant itself was not the only ground breaking progress here either - though of course it is the headline the public will most be interested in. But at the same time the immune system of the recipient was suppressed by a new experimental drug to prevent rejection. While the heart itself was preserved up until implantation using a new perfusion technology. So two new technologies brought into play there too.

Overall an interesting story.

As to the OPs questions: Not struggling with the ethics of it myself as we already use animals for food and grind up their organs to produce insulin and so on. So finding one more use on top of all that seems relatively irrelevant. What religious concerns have to do with it I am unclear. If - to paraphrase Obamas speech on secularism - the religious can translate their religiously motivated concerns into real world arguments accessible to us all - I am happy to hear them speak on the matter. Other than that - listen to them if you feel like it - and let them off down the ballot box like the rest of us :)