Surgeons Transplant Pig Kidney Into a Patient, a Medical Milestone

[Native]

20. This article about the ethical issues regarding this is really good.

I thought these two points most interesting:

1. Montgomery agreed that the practice raises important animal welfare questions. When I asked him about the euthanizing of the donor pig, he raised the question, “Is it more humane to euthanize the pig and remove both kidneys for two transplants, or to remove one kidney and have the pig sustain the recovery period, where there’s pain and risk of infection?” It’s also not clear who would care for a donor pig that did survive, and who could pay for that care.

2. Peter Singer, the moral philosopher at Princeton who helped launch the modern animal rights movement and is also a vocal advocate for kidney donation, told me in an email that he is cautiously supportive of even lethal pig donations. “I would not insist on the pig surviving the surgery, because that’s an uncertain benefit and would require twice as many pigs to be used,” Singer wrote. “What I would like to see is that all pigs involved in the procedure — including at the research stage, which obviously will continue for some years, and including the pigs’ parents — are reared in conditions that meet not only their physical needs but their psychological and social needs — so not in a factory farm. That seems a minimum quid pro quo for the benefit the pig is conferring on humans.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22738680/pig-kidney-human-transplant