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In another milestone giving a peek at wonders to come, a 33-year-old woman was kept alive for 8 days on an artificial liver that uses pig-liver cells to purify blood. The woman was waiting for a liver transplant which she finally received.
"It was amazing we kept this woman going for so many days – she was very, very sick," Elizabeth Fagan, professor of internal medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, told Wired.
According to Fagan, the woman would have died without the device, which resembles a dialysis machine but uses living cells. Contradicting animal rights propaganda about animals and humans, Fagan noted that "pig livers are very similar in size to a human’s, and the way the pig liver metabolizes hormones and chemicals and toxins is similar."
The success of the artificial liver moves medical science one step forward to the day when permanent, genetically engineered organs might replace or augment current human organ transplantation. As such successes mount, expect animal rights activists, extreme environmentalists, and others to step up their campaign to have such procedures banned (on the other hand, the success of such technologies will likely put another nail into the coffin of whatever slim possibility the animal rights agenda has of succeeding merely through persuasion rather than direct action and violence).
Source:
Part machine, part pig liver. Kristen Philipkoski, Wired News, January 28, 1999.