The Five Piggies of the Apocalypse, by John Robins

(Beth Clifton collage)

Will pig-to-human transplants cause farmers to grow hearts?

[John Robins is director of Ethical Promotions Ltd and Campaigns Consultant to Animal Concern, incorporating the Scottish Anti-Vivisection Society, founded in 1876.]

How much is a pig worth? A farmer in Fife producing free-range organically grown animals for the top end of the meat market might expect to get upwards of $250 for a prime porker.

That is good money for farmers today. However margins are tight and even breeding pigs worth $250 each is not going to make you a fortune.

John F. Robins

Why breed pigs for meat when they can be bred for transplant?

To make some big money out of pigs you should forget any nonsense about breeding free-range organic “happy” pigs and get into the cloning business. Why breed animals worth $250 when you can create critters worth over $1.5 million each?

This, to be sure, is a steeply discounted price. After PPL Therapeutics announced in 2000 that they had cloned five piglets, their shares jumped 19%, bringing the value of the company to over $130 million.

That made Alexis, Carrel, Christa, Dotcom and Millie, born at PPL’s laboratory in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA on March 5, 2000, worth around a cool $4.2 million apiece––nearly three times the estimated value of their descendant whose heart was transplanted into David Bennett, 57, on January 7, 2022 at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

The pig-cloning scientific breakthrough back in 2000 put PPL Therapeutics way ahead of its competitors in the race to be first to create commercial quantities of pigs to supply organs and cells for transplant to humans. If they corner that market, the former division of PPL now doing business as Revivicor could be raking in around $10 billion a year––even selling pig hearts at the discounted rate.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Production issues

Before you phone your stockbroker to hog your place at the trough, though, it might be as well to look at the drawbacks of the cloned pig industry. The profits come from producing genetically altered pigs whose organs, like the heart transplanted into Bennett, are less likely to be rejected by human recipients.

One technique is to de-activate a gene called alpha 1-3 gal transferase. This gene produces a sugar in pig cells which the human immune system recognizes and attacks, causing organ rejection. Once you turn off that gene, removing the sugars which identify a pig organ as a pig organ, the human immune system is less likely to attack the transplanted liver, kidney or heart. Coupled with tailor-made anti-rejection drugs, modified pigs could provide an endless supply of organs for transplant to humans.

One major problem is that only a small percentage of piglets born to transgenically modified sows carry the necessary genetic alteration. For every potential donor piglet, dozens more are born as ordinary pigs, who are of no use for transplants and have to be destroyed.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Wastage

To avoid this waste, the idea is to take cells from transgenically modified pigs, use these to clone embryos identical to the parent animal, implant the embryos into surrogate mother pigs, and then wait for the arrival of litters of pigs matching in every way their genetically modified unnatural parent.

In previous cloning experiments, including those which produced Dolly the cloned Roslin sheep in 1996, touching off the race to produce cloned organs for transplant, it was discovered that a side effect of cloning was the production of damaged offspring.

Some of these miscarried. Others were born malformed and either died shortly after birth or had to be destroyed. Even with such problems cloning does produce a much larger number of viable offspring than breeding directly from modified animals. The sale price of each surviving cloned pig, worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, makes the losses financially acceptable to the companies involved.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Sheep on a rooftop

Animal to human transplants, or xenotransplantation to give the process its Sunday name, has been the dream of medical researchers for many years.

About 35 years ago I found myself in the company of a very reluctant sheep and two very enthusiastic scientists on the roof of an old warehouse in the London docklands.

We were there for a televised debate on xenotransplantation. I put it to the scientists that modifying animals to make their tissues more like human tissues creates a bridge across which animal diseases could cross to humans.

The scientists suggested I was dafter than the sheep and spouting scaremongering nonsense.

Eleven years later, after thousands of sheep, pigs and other animals had died in xenotransplant experiments, the British government refused to allow clinical trials involving transplanting organs from genetically modified pigs to humans.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Retroviruses sent the pig-cloning business to the U.S.

The reason for this moratorium was that some scientists had identified the risk of diseases crossing the species barrier from pigs to humans! The risk they identified was one of retroviruses found in pigs being transplanted with the pig organs and putting the human recipient at risk.

That ban on animal to human transplants is still in force in the U.K., but those set to make vast profits from such transplants are lobbying hard for permission to start clinical trials.

Companies have also moved their research out of the U.K. to other countries, such as the United States, where such strict controls are not in force.

At the hazard of again being called a scaremonger, I have to disagree that pig viruses present a risk only to individuals receiving pig organs. What scares me is that there already exist herds of pigs modified to make their tissues more like human tissue. These animals could be acting as incubators for new diseases to which humans have no resistance or medication.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Spillover risk

It would not take a transplant to transfer such diseases to humans. All it would take would be for a laboratory worker to pick up the illness from contact with the animals and then carry that illness home and into the wider community.

At the moment only a few relatively small herds of genetically modified pigs exist. Now that cloning these animals is a reality, along with transplanting their organs into humans there could be hundreds of large herds within just a few years. The risk of a potential new pandemic of lethal disease is about to multiply.

If the world’s past bouts with swine flu, SARS, and the H5N1 avian influenza failed to make the point, our struggles of the past two years with COVID-19, and now the delta and omicron COVID-19 variants certainly ought to.

The COVID-19 disease family alone has now killed more than 5.5 million people, and bear in mind that COVID-19 spilled over into humans, somehow, from wild bats, not from animals purposely modified so that their genetics would be compatible with our own.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Not ten bucks a pound

Other issues have to be taken into account. Despite what they might say, scientists are not doing this research out of altruism. You will not be able to nip down to the butchers and buy a plug-in pig heart or liver for ten dollars a pound. These organs, even if mass-produced, will cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

Further, if they are tied into a lifelong course of tailor-made anti-rejection drugs, as is likely, it will cost another tens of thousands of dollars a year––or much more––to maintain each patient.

Here in the United Kingdom, our National Health Service is already desperate for a transfusion of funds. The bill for xenotransplantation would bleed it to death.

In the U.S., where most health care is covered by private insurance policies, whose soaring cost obliged the 2010 introduction of “Obamacare” to keep most Americans semi-covered, so-called “pork barrel politics” might be expected to protect the affluent, whose feet are most deeply implanted in the public trough. Other Americans will be sent squealing home.

Lack of ethical & political controls

Pig to human transplant experiments highlight the lack of ethical and political controls on research. Despite the risks to humans, and the fact that our public health services may never be able to afford these new procedures, scientists have been allowed to go ahead. Thousands of animals have suffered and died, yet all we currently have to show for it is the risk of a new disease.

Politicians could make major changes by introducing an opt-out system for human organ transplants, whereby organs would be presumed available for transplant unless a person has specified otherwise, thus releasing far more human organs to be transplanted.

Politicians should also suspend all xenotransplant research until the risks have been fully identified and the ethics of subjecting animals to the suffering involved in these dubious experiments is fully debated.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Not just animals at risk

At the moment it is not just animals who are at risk. The whole human population is unwittingly taking part in an extremely dangerous experiment where the basic building blocks of life are being tampered with and changed without due consideration of the consequences.

I wish David Bennett well. I doubt very much if he is fully aware of the decades of suffering which led to the experiment he is now part of. Mr. Bennett gave his consent to participate in this procedure. Something the tens of thousands of sheep, pigs, non-human primates and other sentient animals sacrificed in xenotransplant and cloning research could not do.

(Beth & Merritt Clifton)

[John Robins’ guest column for ANIMALS 24-7, above, required surprisingly little updating from an earlier edition published by the Edinburgh Evening News on March 15, 2000.]

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sara starkey says

January 15, 2022 at 7:30 am

You’d think these sods would have some humility and shame after Gain of Function research at the Wuhan Lab (denied as a ‘conspiracy theory’) causing the World to bloody shut down and the poor dying of hunger in these LockDowns; asides from giving us a new and often deadly Corona virus. But no……

Now we have the ‘brilliant’ pig to human heart transplant. All glee at the news on the radio. Wonder how that will pan out? One of the surgeons, she was SO casual in saying how many of these operations had been done on pigs to primates before getting to this daring try on pig to human.

One of the surgeons says “This is a very early experiment and will not translate into clinical practice within a short period of time,” he says. “If it works, it could be a small number of years away.”
A ’small number of years’…….I bet it will be a ‘large’ number of years assuming this actually ‘works’ and the side effects don’t kill the person.

Also a very interesting article put out by Science Media Centre on 11/1/2022 pointing out the chance of a virus mutating and escaping. https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-pig-heart-transplant/

Here is my take when writing to the Guardian in 2019 after yet another pig to human organ claim: ‘Pioneer UK surgeon Sir Terence English says adapted organs could transform treatment.’

‘Why do you buy into this every time? Just because a scientist says it? I presume scientists were at the forefront of discovering how to turn oil into plastic and 50 odd years down the line look where that has got us.
As to tweaking a bit of DNA here and there and hey presto we have pig hearts modified to transplant into humans…….oh please where do your sceptical faculties go to when talking to a professor.
We are constantly given the hope that pigs will be used as spare body parts.

The Ind 29/8/1992 ‘Pigs may become donors for human lung transplants….’within 10 yrs’
The Ind 24/6/1993 ‘Pig-to-human transplant …..“in 3 years”
The Ind 28/9/1993 ‘Animal organ transplants….. “likely within 3 yrs”
Daily Mail 28/9/1993 ‘Surgeons will successfully transplant animal organs into humans….. within 3 yrs’
Guardian 29/9/1993 ‘ Pigs may be key to transplants. Trials might start …within 3 yrs’
The Ind 30/3/94 ‘Pigs bred to carry human genes……use in transplant surgery within 3 yrs’.
Yet again we are told there is a cure for parkinson’s et al just around the corner. Hope over experience I would suggest.
Observer 24/7/1994 ‘Pigs’ liver transplant op…….. ‘later this year’
E. Standard 12/9/1995 ‘First human is to be given animal heart ….’next year’
Guardian 3/1/2002 The possibility of pig to human organ transplants took a leap forward on Christmas Day when a litter of genetically modified pigs was born in Virginia.
Guardian 10/9/2005 ‘Animal organ trials….. ‘within 5 yrs’
Times 3/6/2009 ‘GM pigs could provide organs for transplant …..’within a decade’
Daily Express 4/2/2010 ‘Scientists move a step closer to transplanting pig lungs into humans…within 5 yrs’
The Ind 21/10/2011 ‘Pig to human tissue transplants ‘imminent’
The Times 19/8/2019 Hopes of pig hearts for humans by 2022
Guardian19/8/2019 Pig to human heart transplants ‘possible within three years’

Comments

Jamaka Petzak says

January 13, 2022 at 10:12 pm

None so blind as those who will not see. Sharing, with gratitude, and a plethora of other thoughts and emotions, none of them positive.
Karen Davis says

January 14, 2022 at 4:27 pm

In an earlier comment to Animals 24-7 this week, I referenced a book by the “medical thriller” author Robin Cook, MD, which includes a gene-editing farmed animal complex called the Farm Institute. Am now reading Cook’s book, “Death Benefit,” which features a research institute focused on learning to grow whole organs from stem cells derived from the recipient’s own body, thereby solving the immune-system’s rejection of a foreign organ. This accomplishment could conceivably eliminate the use of animals (mice mainly) for this particular purpose.

That would be great, but what is striking in virtually all of the coverage of these feats, whether in fiction or in real life, is the thrill and the pride people feel about the ability of science to do amazing, “impossible” things. This bedazzlement trumps all other emotions elicited by the experimental enterprise, regardless of who pays the price, or how steep.

“Death Benefit” makes me think also of how closely linked the project of growing whole organs for human recipients (organogenesis) resembles the current investment in growing animal muscle in laboratory vats with the goal of replacing animal slaughter with cellular meat. Fantastic, perhaps, but not scientifically impossible. The scientific challenge is euphoric.

Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. http://www.upc-online.org
sara starkey says

January 15, 2022 at 7:30 am

You’d think these sods would have some humility and shame after Gain of Function research at the Wuhan Lab (denied as a ‘conspiracy theory’) causing the World to bloody shut down and the poor dying of hunger in these LockDowns; asides from giving us a new and often deadly Corona virus. But no……

Now we have the ‘brilliant’ pig to human heart transplant. All glee at the news on the radio. Wonder how that will pan out? One of the surgeons, she was SO casual in saying how many of these operations had been done on pigs to primates before getting to this daring try on pig to human.

One of the surgeons says “This is a very early experiment and will not translate into clinical practice within a short period of time,” he says. “If it works, it could be a small number of years away.”
A ’small number of years’…….I bet it will be a ‘large’ number of years assuming this actually ‘works’ and the side effects don’t kill the person.

Also a very interesting article put out by Science Media Centre on 11/1/2022 pointing out the chance of a virus mutating and escaping. https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-pig-heart-transplant/

Here is my take when writing to the Guardian in 2019 after yet another pig to human organ claim: ‘Pioneer UK surgeon Sir Terence English says adapted organs could transform treatment.’

‘Why do you buy into this every time? Just because a scientist says it? I presume scientists were at the forefront of discovering how to turn oil into plastic and 50 odd years down the line look where that has got us.
As to tweaking a bit of DNA here and there and hey presto we have pig hearts modified to transplant into humans…….oh please where do your sceptical faculties go to when talking to a professor.
We are constantly given the hope that pigs will be used as spare body parts.

The Ind 29/8/1992 ‘Pigs may become donors for human lung transplants….’within 10 yrs’
The Ind 24/6/1993 ‘Pig-to-human transplant …..“in 3 years”
The Ind 28/9/1993 ‘Animal organ transplants….. “likely within 3 yrs”
Daily Mail 28/9/1993 ‘Surgeons will successfully transplant animal organs into humans….. within 3 yrs’
Guardian 29/9/1993 ‘ Pigs may be key to transplants. Trials might start …within 3 yrs’
The Ind 30/3/94 ‘Pigs bred to carry human genes……use in transplant surgery within 3 yrs’.
Yet again we are told there is a cure for parkinson’s et al just around the corner. Hope over experience I would suggest.
Observer 24/7/1994 ‘Pigs’ liver transplant op…….. ‘later this year’
E. Standard 12/9/1995 ‘First human is to be given animal heart ….’next year’
Guardian 3/1/2002 The possibility of pig to human organ transplants took a leap forward on Christmas Day when a litter of genetically modified pigs was born in Virginia.
Guardian 10/9/2005 ‘Animal organ trials….. ‘within 5 yrs’
Times 3/6/2009 ‘GM pigs could provide organs for transplant …..’within a decade’
Daily Express 4/2/2010 ‘Scientists move a step closer to transplanting pig lungs into humans…within 5 yrs’
The Ind 21/10/2011 ‘Pig to human tissue transplants ‘imminent’
The Times 19/8/2019 Hopes of pig hearts for humans by 2022
Guardian19/8/2019 Pig to human heart transplants ‘possible within three years’
- Merritt Clifton says
  
  January 15, 2022 at 7:42 am
  
  ANIMALS 24-7 is extremely skeptical that the global COVID-19 pandemic originated either from “gain of function” experiments in Wuhan or any other scientific procedure. It is clear, however, that it has continued to spread and worsen through disregard of science by anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.