Did you... read the article? Using this procedure, there's a 25% chance you'll be dead in 8 years. Not using this procedure, there's a 33% change you'll be dead in 8 years. Not getting a kidney, there's a 56% chance you'll be dead in 8 years. That's great news - but we're talking about cutting down the mortality of nephrology patients, not transhumanism. Do you know any transplant recipients? I had lunch with a 3-kidneyed buddy just last week. He's still in touch with an ex-girlfriend of mine, who's a social worker at the Northwest Kidney Center. What about you? Is this something you know something about? Or are you just slingin' it up there because you just know somehow that if you keep goading me I"ll be wrong? Never mind, don't care.In the new study, 1,025 patients at 22 medical centers who had an incompatible donor were compared to an equal number of patients who remained on waiting lists for an organ or who had an organ from a deceased but compatible donor. After eight years, 76.5 percent of those who received an incompatible kidney were still alive, compared with 62.9 percent who remained on the waiting list or received a deceased donor kidney and 43.9 percent who remained on the waiting list but never got a transplant.
Not mudslingin, just sayin. Transplant issues fascinate me; it is something I have thought about since I was young and I will almost never forego a chance to say something about it. My father was the 7th person ever to get up off the table from a single lung transplant by the only surgeon in the world that had ever done one successfully. 1986. Average post-transplant lifespan at that point was a few months. He lived 8 more and 7 of those were great. The median survival for single-lung recipients is now 4.6 years. and 6.6 for double-lung recipients. He had (I think) 7 articles published about him in The New England Journal of Medicine. Some because of the transplant. Some because of experimental anti-rejection drugs he took. One which he turned out to be allergic to. Which led to the final article about being the first person in North America to take AZT (the AIDS miracle drug that was not approved until 1990). Which did not work. Slow but steady progress. Hopefully.
And my great-uncle was the guy credited with a surgical remedy for Blue Baby Syndrome. Don't get me wrong - I'm a big booster of medical science and its advancements. But the goal of surgery and transplantation has always been to get patients as close to "healthy" as possible. In a perfect world, things work so well that lung patients like your father live just as long as everyone else. In a perfect world we grow new lungs in a jar while we wait and put them in outpatient. That's be spectacular. That would improve the quality of life for every person on the planet. But it would not be transhumanism.
Agreed. Transplants are not a "cure" at this point. I must have missed the transhumanism discussion and that is not something I meant to invoke.