Luhan Yang at TED2018 (transcript)
How to create a world where no one dies waiting for a transplant
Summary
The story is about xenotransplantation. It means a process of transplanting animal organs into humans and it's famously known that some pigs carry organs with similar size and physiology to human organs.
The speaker explained that there are two problems with that, I thought that there are many other moral or ethical problems, though.
The two problems that she had were rejection and a virus.
The problem of rejection is that when the human immune system sees a new organ as foreign, it will reject it. Her team succeeded that by a process of cloning, the birthing piglet can carry organs whose genetic makeup hopefully wouldn't be rejected by the human immune system.
The next problem of a virus is that every pig carries a virus that is benign to the pig, but can be transmitted into humans. They succeeded also to take out all the virus, to modify within a cell and to eliminate the possibility of the dangerous virus being transmitted into humans.
Now, a lot of people need a lifesaving transplant, organs are shortages, and they won't be able to wait for humans' brain dead to transplant. The pig that gives one organ can still be alive. This will be a world where no one dies waiting for a transplant.
xenotransplantation / the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues between members of different species.
benign /adj/ (of a disease) not harmful in effect
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