pigs and guinea pigs

Tea at Trianon links to a xenotransplant, where a man was given a pig kidney. 

 He later died, cause of death not mentioned, and the family says thank you to the doctors for giving him seven more weeks of life. 

 what's wrong with this picture?

It was unethical since an alternative treatment was available: renal dialysis.

This is not the first time the ethics have been stretched to experiment with transplanting organs.

Last year, doctors in NYC hospital did a gene edited pig kidney transplant that worked for one month. And Univ Ala did a kidney tranplant and it lasted one week.

The problem? The patients involved were "brain dead", so could not give consent. (and I am not going to go into the problems of diagnosing brain death, nor will I discuss how ethicists are trying to expand that definition to get more organ donors from people merely comatose. That is a discussion for another time).

see ethical discussion of transplants from animals here.

the problem with pig transplants goes beyond ethics and the YUCK factor:

in the Massachusetts case, the gentleman and his family gave their consent, so the ethical question of choice did not occur, although one wonders if the family actually recognized the experimental danger. So the ethics was not worse than doing it on a brain dead person who had no choice.

But for the gentleman in Massachusetts, what is not mentioned in the articles is the dirty little secrets that  there is a well known treatment for kidney failure: Dialysis.

italics mine.

you can live for years on dialysis, but previous brain dead patients given transplants of pig kidneys only lived a month or two, so there was no guarantee that this would have kept him alive for a long time.

So maybe if he just remained on dialysis he might have lived a couple more years. I hope the family realizes this and gets a good lawyer to sue.

 But never mind. The headlines make the doctors proud of themselves.

and oh yes: Follow the money

But surging interest in xenotransplantation, predicted by some estimates to be a $25-billion-dollar industry within the next five years

Other ethical problems about kidney transplants:  we see here in the third world:  paying a desperately poor person to risk his health donating a kidney for money, or buying one in China from a FalunGong prisoner scheduled for execution.

so was the experimental treatment of this Massachusetts gentleman cleared by the hospital ethics board?

yes I am sure that the ethics boards okayed it.

 bioethicists are quite flexible in many ways, and any lay person reading the ethical literatures for the last 30 years would be shocked at things that have been proposed.

which is why civil libertarian expert Nat Hentoff once called bioethicists apologists for death, because they could always figure a way to make anything ethical, up to and including killing a patient.