Word: pigging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...sounds like a fine idea. Except that a handful of soldiers are blaming The Shot for any number of physical ravages (thyroid malfunctions, autoimmune disorders, heart stoppages, etc.), and a growing number of others are refusing to take it on the grounds that the Pentagon is out to guinea-pig them into an early grave. All of which, admittedly, was easy enough for me to be impassive about - until it was my turn...
...popular. Today, they have become the Harvard man's passport to a social life. But the societies' principal purpose was to provide its members with good company and a good meal. The Porcellian was founded in 1791 by a group of friends who decided they wanted to eat roast pig together every month...
...announced Tuesday that it had produced five cloned piglets - and not only that, certain genes had been "knocked out" of some organ cells of the above-named piglets, signaling a breakthrough in the medical application of cloning technology: Knocking out the genes prevents a human recipient from rejecting a pig organ transplant. "This opens the door to making modified pigs whose organs and cells can be successfully transplanted into humans - the only near-term solution to solving the worldwide organ shortage crisis," said a spokesman for PPL Therapeutics, the company behind the experiments. Although moral critics of the practice will...