Recent headlines have heralded the arrival of gene-edited piglets free of viruses that could stand in the way of safe transplantation of porcine organs into humans. The fact is that such attempts at xenotransplantation are nothing new, and more significantly, that the researchers’ “success” is questionable, for both technical and ethical reasons.
Drawings of human-animal hybrids, or chimeras, date back to prehistoric times — who can forget the bird-headed man in the French Lascaux cave or the ancient Egyptian deities with human heads on animal bodies such as the Great Sphinx?
According to the NIH’s A Brief History of Clinical Xenotransplantation, the first attempts to intermingle humans and other species actually began back in the 16th century with xenotransfusions, blood transfusions from animals to humans. By the 19th century, doctors were attempting interspecies skin transplantations using both furless creatures such as frogs — who were sometimes skinned alive during the process — as well as furry creatures such as sheep, rabbits, dogs, cats, rats, chickens, and pigeons. The first pig-to-human corneal transplant was attempted in 1838. None of these early efforts were believed to be very successful, and it would not have occurred to many at the time that these experiments gave no consideration whatsoever to the suffering of the animals involved. (Here’s an even more thorough history of xenotransplantation if you’re interested.)
There’s a chronic shortage of human organs available for transplants. Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at the United Network for Organ Sharing, tells New York Times that last year’s 33,600 organ transplants in the U.S. left 116,800 patients still on waiting lists.
22 Americans waiting for organs die each day according to Science. Hence the continued keen interested in xenotransplantation.Some suggest, however, that with a better, simpler — and more ethical — solution already available, this may actually reflect the eagerness of scientists to do science more than it does a genuine desire for an answer to a problem. As bioethicist L. Syd M Johnson tells Big Think, “The shortage of transplantable organs is a very real problem. Other countries have had great success increasing donations by doing simple things like making everyone a donor, unless they explicitly opt-out. Social engineering is a low-tech solution to the organ shortage, and much safer, easier, and cheaper than the high tech genetic engineering being done to possibly make xenotransplantation possible.”
One of the major stumbling blocks in the transplantation of pig organs — which may in other ways be human-compatible — are PERVs, an (unfortunate) acronym for “porcine endogenous retroviruses.” PERVs are gamma retroviruses, genetic remnants of ancient viral infections, and they’re woven into the pig genome. There are multiple types of PERV, but it’s know that PERV-A and…
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