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...going to eat meat, there's no real reason the internal organs, properly cooked, should be any less clean than regular meat. After all, at least those parts of the animal don't touch the soil or grass. For that matter, a piece of cabbage, seeing as it's pulled off the soil, is pretty disgusting. Organ meats cooked well achieve a level of intensity no chicken-breast dish can ever hope to match. It's odd that organ meats tend to fall either in the lowest end or the highest end of the culinary caste system...
...cattle also toddling out of the labs. Last week cloning technology took another step forward when an international biotechnology company announced that it had created a litter of five genetically identical piglets, and that it had a pretty good idea of how they could one day be used: as organ donors for ailing humans...
...idea of turning pigs into tissue factories has been around for at least 30 years. Pigs breed easily and mature quickly, and their organs are roughly the same size as those of humans, meaning operations can be performed with a relative snap-out, snap-in simplicity. The problem is, once the donor organ is stitched in place, the body rebels, rejecting it even more violently than it would a human graft. "A pig heart transplanted in a person would turn black within minutes," says David Ayares, a research director with PPL Therapeutics, the biotech firm based in Scotland, New Zealand...
What causes porcine organs to be rejected so quickly is a sugar molecule on the surface of pig cells that identifies the tissue as unmistakably nonhuman. When the immune system spots this marker, it musters its defenses. PPL scientists recently succeeded in finding the gene responsible for the sugar and knocking it out of the nucleus of a pig cell. Their next step would be to extract that nucleus, insert it into a hollowed-out pig ovum and insert the ovum into the womb of a host sow. The sugar-free piglet that was eventually born could then be cloned...
Despite this recent success, PPL is not likely to be setting up its organ shop anytime soon. Knocking out the key sugar gene solves only the problem of short-term rejection. Long-term rejection, caused by blood coagulating around the new organ, requires that researchers re-engineer an entirely different set of genes that code for anticoagulants. But even this would not be a perfect solution, and recipients of pig organs would probably still have to take the same rainbow of antirejection drugs recipients of human organs must now endure...