1y ago

The first human organ created inside an animal opens the door to manufacturing ‘spare parts’ for people

english.elpais.com The first human organ created inside an animal opens the door to manufacturing ‘spare parts’ for people

In an experiment that raises bioethical issues, researchers in China have generated a blueprint of a humanized kidney in a pig embryo

Edit: Surprised at all the vegans in this thread. I didn't think there were so many of you. I'm glad you care so much about animal rights, that you're willing to forego eating them and using products made from them. If you're not vegan and have moral objections for this, maybe you should look at yourself first and all the animal abuse you sanction by eating animals and using animal products. Did you know dairy cows have to be pregnant to produce milk? They're artificially inseminated throughout most of their lives. I hope everyone complaining about this also complains about ice cream and cheese. Or else they would be hypocrites who just want to blame others but never look at themselves.

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Am I the only one who thinks it's fucked up to experiment on animals who can't consent to this? We place so much emphasis on people being the most important thing in the world, we forgot that we are part of the ecosystem too.
- This is and will always be small potatoes in terms of the suffering we put relatively intelligent animals through every day.
  We would need to slaughter probably 100,000 animals yearly for the US organ demand (at ~50,000 transplants per year and a buffer).
  We slaughter 125 MILLION pigs in the US for consumption a year.
  Not to mention that "medical grade" pigs will probably be given a golden ticket in terms of care until they are slaughtered, compared to the extremely abysmal environment millions live in today.
  If animal welfare is important to you, scientific research is a poor use of advocating resources while we still eat hundreds of pounds of meat yearly. If advocates reduce meat consumption by even a percent or two it would generally greatly outweigh banning animal based research entirely.
  
  Sure, but the article isn't about the inhumane treatment of our industrial meat production facilities. I'm well aware of them. And I want those gone too.
  
  Good thing you're not consuming or using animal products, then. Or else you'd be a hypocrite.
  
  Always with the you can't participate in society and criticize it argument. It's pathetic.
  
  I mean, you can participate in society without eating meat. Lol.
  Unless you were talking to someone else?
  
  You can't tell anyone to stop eating meat if you eat meat
  Edit: Or else you'd be a hypocrite
  
  Sure I can.
- Animal testing isn’t ideal but for important medical advances, animal testing is the only way to demonstrate safety before human trials. At some point, you have to value the life of a human more than mice.
  And some of the testing is fun. Like when they give them a buzzer to get more drugs. Lab rats definitely consent to more cocaine.
  
  Confirmed, cocaine is lab rat approved.
  
  I don't value a humans life more.
  
  Then maybe we should eat you instead of the pig!
  Mmmmm, longpig
  
  I will never understand how wanting to treat intelligent creatures with dignity is controversial.
  Seriously? Who even talks like this..
  
  It's not controversial, most people think it's stupid. Controversial would be if so many people agreed with you that it would polarize the society. Which you might think is what happens, but it's really not.
  Most people know that a human's life is more valuable than an animal's and think you guys are a little crazy. Treating them with dignity is fine by me, but pretending they're on the same level as us is not.
  
  It's not stupid just because you think it is. Doctors also used to think that washing their hands between surgeries was unnecessary.
  Point is, just because I value live in general and don't think humans are necessarily more valuable than anything else doesn't make it crazy.
  
  I'm not saying it's a universal truth, you may have noticed I used words like "think". To me you guys are crazy and I think it's very stupid. But I never claimed it's a universal truth.
  
  Surely you must have some system for valuing certain forms of life over others, otherwise functioning is not really possible given the reality we find ourselves in. For example, pretty much anyone at some level values the lives of humans or more intelligent animals over the lives of, say, mosquitos, cockroaches, flies, etc, but those insects are animals too after all. (And while one certainly might put some value on some insects, I know if I find a ladybug inside I'm decently likely to try to take it outside without hurting it, I've never met anyone who would get as worked up about a dead bug as they would a dead cat, or put the same effort into saving a spider that they would into saving another person from a deadly situation. Clearly, the value of such animals is at some level held to be less.) Even further, it would be even more strange to value other living creatures as much as humans, like plants or bacteria (indeed, considering that one involuntarily kills countless bacteria just by existing and must consume plants to live, a hypothetical person who cared just as much about them as people would either have absolutely no regard for the lives of others, or would be consumed by constant guilt to the point of probably being unable to survive in the long run). Clearly then, just about everyone has some sort of hierarchy of what animals are more valuable than others, whether one consciously believes it or not. If intelligence is the metric that one uses to decide this, then one must value humans more than any known animal, because while some are smart, no animal is quite as smart as humans are. If intelligence is not the metric you use, then what is?
  
  Alternatively people who don't value other people's lives may have a personality disorder (emphasis on may). Of course that is if it's not to sound edgy on the internet but if they truly don't value human life.
  
  I don't donate my kidney, even though I want to, because I won't give good organs to my local trump supporters.
  This is another reason that animal-grown organs are good. Those people deserve to live, I just don't want to give them my kidney.
  
  It's interesting that you bring this up because I have been encountering people lately who have a different take on insects - that they actually kind of put insects above humans. Just yesterday someone responded to me saying I get attacked by bugs that, quote "You are not getting attacked. You just live in the same world like them and take up space that once was theirs before"
  So like its my fault that I'm getting bug bites. Humans are to blame for existing in the wildlife and that's why animals and insects try to take people out all the time.
  There's this popular poster on tumblr who goes by bogleech - their stuff gets reposted to reddit last I saw. They also support this idea that bugs are superior and humans need to just stop being afraid of insects and respect them more.
  
  Feel free to volunteer for testing then.
  
  Not even the hot ones? Hot people are pretty valuable.
- I mean, you're probably not the only one who thinks anything.
  That said, do you eat meat? If so, the meat and dairy industries systematically do egregious things to millions of animals every day.
  
  Dude if I can preorder a whole pig with a replacement set of lungs too ….
  Dinner and an upgrade?
  
  Bacon and breathing
  
  I limit my meat consumption, and I don't drink milk. Not a 100% vegetarian, but it's better than nothing. One of these days I'll decide to be a vegetarian again.
  
  So, you're eating meat and being all hypocritical about others.
  
  Do you eat cheese or other dairy products?
- We are, but being a part of the ecosystem doesn't really mean much. Ecosystems aren't obligations, authorities, sources of morality or subject to it. They're just systems of relationships between organisms in a particular place. Whatever humans do, as long as it involves other organisms, that is our role in the local ecosystem. If we start doing something else, we aren't forgetting our role in the ecosystem, no role was ever assigned to us, our "role" is merely descriptive of what impact we have.
  
  There are plenty of carnivores in the ecosystem. But I can’t think of another one that keeps prey suffering in a box from birth to death in order to feed itself.
  It’s funny that we consider ourselves higher organisms because only we can even think about ethics or have ethics. But is it ethical to treat those incapable of ethics unethically?? If we are the only one in the picture with ethics, don’t we have a double responsibility to apply them for all?
  
  If other predators were even capable of animal agriculture, I'd bet that there's a good chance that they would do it, but that's of course not really possible to know for sure. If we were going to apply ethics to things like animals that don't naturally have them, though, wouldn't we basically be obligated to destroy the natural ecosystem even more than we already do? The natural environment is, for something living it, absolutely horrendous. Not in the same way as things for a farm animal, but still, natural ecosystems tend to result in a situation where organisms must constantly fend of starvation, predation, parasites and infection, and few creatures live as long as they potentially could. If we really cared much about the well being of all the animals out there, we'd basically have to destroy the natural biosphere completely and keep all remaining animals in idealized captive conditions, like pets or zoo animals, to keep them free of predators and disease.
  
  We can’t call other species unethical because they are either ethical nor unethical.
  And so no, although nature is brutal, we are not obligated to destroy it (though some actually do hold this position on the grounds that it would reduce suffering).
  The only creature we can judge ethically is ourselves. My point is that we ket ourselves off the hook on treatment of animals. Because they have no ethical function, they are like objects to us, and we do (vaguely gestures at this post) whatever to them. Our logic seems to be “until you’re capable ethics I don’t need to treat you with any, even though I’m capable.” It’s a neat little self-serving loophole we love to exploit.
- It’s just another version of the food chain
- Everyone is rushing in here to say it’s fine because we eat meat too. But I find this whole thing g very revealing of attitudes we usually just don’t think about. We’d never farm organs in human embryos because GASP consent and GASP sanctity of life. But we’ll farm organs cross species, which is surely more difficulty, because we’re so comfortable doing all that to animals.
  You can take the perspective that it’s fine because meat. Or you can use this to take a second look at eating meat and suddenly it seems pretty fucked up.
  I eat meat. Am not talking down to anyone. I just do actually think about the ethics.
  
  I take the perspective that it's fine because human life is more important and valuable than animal life.
  Same reason we should eradicate most mosquitos on the planet to end malaria
  
  That’s not a perspective though, it’s a bald assertion. “It’s fine because we’re important” is like saying “it’s fine because it’s fine,” or more to the point “it’s fine because I say so.”
  What makes us important?
  A lot of people don’t seem to understand that their logic is circular. Ask someone why they chose the car they did, and half of them will say “well it’s the one I wanted.”
  
  Animals are things and humans are people.
  You're allowed to devalue your own existence all you want but anyone entertaining the idea that all life is equal is fundamentally stupid in my opinion
  
  You’ve graduated from bald assertions and circular logic to ad hominems.
  It’s ironic what a shit job you’re doing of demonstrating our higher functions and supposed superiority.
  “HUMAN GOOD! NOT HUMAN BAD.”
  Have a great day there, Socrates.
  
  Not bad, just not as valuable as a human.
  
  Even if that claim is true, it can still be bad to eat them.
  
  All morality ultimately comes down to assertions like that though. Ethics aren't properties inherit in the universe that can be objectively measured like the laws of physics. One can construct ethical frameworks, like utilitarianism or deontology or such, as useful tools to help one decide what one should do in an unclear situation, but ultimately, the choice of what framework to use or the rules of that framework comes down to certain things just not feeling right to a given person, and other things feeling okay.
  
  That ethics can't be objectively measured is wrong, though. That's like saying math is not logical because we made it up and you can't observe it in nature.
  It's very difficult and it's not possible to do it in practice since we can not look at every variable of every sentient being at all times. But in theory it would be possible to find the most ethical solution to every problem every time and therefore it is measurable.
  
  it would be possible to find the most ethical solution to a problem given all the variables only if you have already selected a system to determine which combinations of values for each variable are more or less ethical. That is to say, if one goes with ultilitarianism, one could hypothetically objectively measure how much happiness or suffering results from a given situation and pick the one that maximized or minimized it, or do the equivalent for a different ethical system, but you cannot objectively decide if utilitarianism, or deontology, or whatever other ethical system one may wish to use, is even the right system to use in the first place. Before your hypothetical measurements of every variable can actually be used to determine what solution to an ethical problem is best, one has to decide what a solution even looks like, and that decision is ultimately arbitrary.
  
  It's not arbitrary, though. It is just hard to define. Ethic theory uses certain axioms that aren't subjective. I am not talking about your moral values, but whether or not certain behaviour is ethical or not.
  As a drastic example, driving over a person because it is faster than driving around them. We can certainly decide for some cases whether that is ethically good or not. For the harder to decide cases it's again just a matter of not knowing all variables. If we would know all variables, we could put each reason for driving over a person on a scale of "ethical goodness". Since we have certain axioms in ethics you can logically conclude a result for all ethical questions (in theory).
  This is not more made up than mathematics are made up. The quantity (not the mass!) of objects, for example, is also just a thought we put onto objects. It's not in the nature of objects to have a quantity. And if we didn't had an inherent concept of mathematics, quantity would not exist for us. In that way, it's different from gravity and other such physical realities. It is the same with ethics.
  
  Quantities do exist in nature, outside of our concepts though. if there exist two electrons in a given area of space vs only one electron in a differen equivalent area of space, the implications of that on everything interacting with them would exist regardless of if we had a word for what two was.
  That aside though, I think that what you have just said confirms what I am trying to say, because you yourself state that ethics are based on axioms. The thing about axioms is that they are not proven, they are statements simply assumed to be true from which all else follows. Mathematics is similarly founded to my understanding, but mathematics can also be compared to measured reality to confirm if the system derived from a certain set of axioms describes that reality (for example, euclidian geometry follows logically from a set of axioms, but since the discovery of relativity seems to show that physical space does not always perfectly follow euclidian geometry, it can be shown by observation of the physical universe that this mathematical model doesn't completely fit reality. It's still useful of course, and it does still logically follow from it's axioms- but those axioms can be verified as fitting observable reality or not, it isn't arbitrary if you accept those axioms, if you're talking about our universe that is. But ethical axioms are a different matter. Sure, you can have an objective ethical system, based on a set of ethical axioms, but to do this you have to accept that particular set of axioms in the first place. If one was to use a different set of axioms, you'd get different ethics.
  Suppose we were to meet some aliens- intelligent and technologically sophisticated aliens, in the same way and degree that we are. They'd probably posses ethics of some kind (since ethics are ultimately a tool for deciding what one should and should not do, and the aliens should need to make such decisions just as we do). They'd also probably posses mathematics, since they're using science and technology. It might not look like our mathematics, having different symbols and phrasing and ways to manipulate those symbols, but it should have roughly equivalent concepts, since they're using it to model the same universe as us. We can assume with reasonable certainly that the axioms used by their mathematics when describing reality will translate to be the same as ours, assuming we both take the measurements needed to confirm if our models fit, there's not room for them to take arbitrarily different axioms here, because if they do, their results just won't be useful except as a mathematical curiosity. However, there's no particular reason that I can see to assume they have to accept equivalent ethical axioms to us (if you can think of a reason to assume that they do have to arrive at the same ones, I'd be interested in hearing it). If they can create a completely different set of ethics starting with different axioms, and don't run into any contradiction with observed reality in using that different model, that would seem to imply that the choice of which axioms to use is ultimately arbitrary, and that we can just choose whatever set of them results in an ethical system that we happen to like.
  
  You could freeze the entire universe, measure the state of every last particle, and you still wouldn't be presented with the answer to a moral question because morality is fundamentally something people made up, but don't collectively agree on. From a truly objective point of view, there is no actual difference between genocide and ending world hunger except the amount of people.
  
  You’re right but there’s a difference between asserting rules for all actors and asserting arbitrary value assignments to different actors.
- Yeah, but you see; the animals are useful in a new way so ethics doesn't matter. We'll worry about that in 50 years when we no longer need them to grow new organs for us
  
  We’ll worry about that in 50 years when we no longer need them to grow new organs for us
  Yes that would be appropriate.
- It's definitely fucked up. It reminds me of the WKUK breakfast pig sketch.
- I would see a million pigs die before one human.
  
  How many pigs would be too many? What is the precise pig to human exchange rate?
  
  That's basically the attitude that is resulting in the 6th mass extinction right now.
  
  Pigs are in no danger of extinction.
  And wanting to preserve natural ecosystems does not imply wanting to improve the treatment of livestock. Incidentally, the end of meat consumption would most likely lead to the extinction of multiple species of livestock.
  
  We brought pigs into existence for the benefit of human conditions, we will take them out of it if and when it becomes necessary.
- I agree. We should be experimenting on prisoners.
  
  Well that's just insane.
  
  I agree. We should be experimenting on schoolchildren.

163 comments