I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
That’s a great question!
Currently, it’s possible to put a piece of pig or cow heart into a human heart to repair it. It’s truly amazing how they do this. But the only reason that this works is that the bit that they use doesn’t have any cells in it. it’s just kinds like some scaffolding that the heart uses to pump.
We are not yet at the point where we can give a human an animal organ. Because humans and animals are quite different, if we put an animal organ into a human, the body would reject it and kill it, much like it fights off a bacteria when you get sick and kills it.
Maybe in the future, it would be possible to put animal parts in to humans, and also human parts into animals, although i agree with you that it might seem wasteful.
Ideally it would be great if we could make robotic organs and all be superhuman!!
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We are able to use parts of the pigs heart (eg. valves) to replace the human heart. So it would make sense that the reverse could also be possible (if there was no rejection). However you are right. It is not ethical to think about using human hearts to cure/ save the lives of animals.
Interesting isn’t it?!?!
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There is reasonably new research being done on transplanting pig’s hearts into baboons (a step away from human trials). But these are no ordinary pigs…they are genetically modified to lack the enzymes that cause rejection of the organs by a human donor.
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