December 09, 2003

New monkeyfilter possible!
posted by Gyan 20 years ago
  • I thought I remembered animal-human transplants taking place years ago, but thought it was pig->human. It was actually baboon->human: a heart for Baby Fae. It's interesting to note that scientists in the Nature article are concerned about blood clotting caused by the immune system's reaction in baboons, as that sounds rather like what killed Baby Fae. Even twenty years later this issue hasn't been fully resolved.
  • From the Baby Fae article: " Q: Looking back, would you have done anything differently? Dr. Bailey: Not really. We did our best at the time. Spending time wishing we'd done something differently is utterly unproductive and unimaginative." The reality about Dr. Bailey: "Bailey's use of baboons was somewhat surprising, given their relatively distant evolutionary relationship to humans compared to other primates. The reason came to light when the Times of London published an interview between Bailey and an Australian radio crew. The reporters had been forbidden to ask direct questions about the operation, so they queried Bailey on the issue of why he had chosen a baboon in view of the baboon's evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey replied, "Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don't believe in evolution.""
  • May I be the first to ask "What the holy fuck?"
  • Cool! So 60 years from now, when people call me a pig, they will be 20% to 50% right. Assuming I will need a lot of spare parts then.
  • Here's something I find very disturbing: This is an older article about a British couple whose edlest son has a rare blood disease and needs a bone marrow transplant from a perfect match. His parents went to fertility specialists in the US in order to have a baby just to provide stem cells to help Charlie. This morning on the news I saw that they have succeeded as Jamie, whose umbilical cord will provide the stem cells, is indeed a perfect match for her brother and does not have the same blood disease. This baby was born not because his/her parents wanted another baby, but purely to cure their son. And apparently this isn't an isolated case (bottom of page).
  • Dang nature protecting its massive and massively influential archives! Which is too bad. As some of y'all might know, my first web job, the one where I learned html, that computers had zombies and why they had daemons, and so on, was at a pioneering science news website back at the turn of the millenium. Now it might be playing the role Portugal did in world exploration in the 17th century for all I know. So in other words, I'm a science news junkie. I've had to restrain myself from copying every link from New Scientist as a FPP, because, let's face it (or face transplant it): most people aren't going to find it as freakishly interesting.