Will pig hearts end up in people?

Researchers keep pig hearts alive in baboons for more than 2 years

This is a real headline.
Should we care?

The picture on the left is a group of doctors transplanting a baboon heart into a human.
Yes – that’s right – a baboon heart into a human.
The pig heart question maybe doesn’t seem so far-fetched any more does it?

Actually – it’s even less far-fetched than you may think –

For the last 10 years, a facility at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, has housed baboons with pig hearts beating in their abdomens. They’re part of an experiment that researchers there hope will help develop pig organs safe for transplant into people, about 22 of whom die each day in the United States alone while waiting for human organs that are in short supply. Today, those NIH researchers and their collaborators report record-setting survival data for five transplanted pig hearts, one of which remained healthy in a baboon for nearly 3 years.

This is from science magazine.  

The experiments didn’t come without problems.  Like the Baboons dying – in spite of the statement made by one of the doctors –

Instead of swapping out a baboon’s original heart, the researchers hooked up the pig heart to blood vessels in the baboon’s abdomen. That way, they could study immune rejection without doing a more elaborate heart surgery—and without needlessly killing a baboon if their approach was a flop.

There will still instances of baboons dying – but apparently they didn’t die “needlessly”.

However – the big problem – 

Simply moving an organ from one animal species into another provokes a violent and immediate attack from the host’s immune system. In early cross-species transplants, “we measured the survivals in minutes,” says David Sachs, a transplant immunologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has worked on xenotransplantation for several decades. In pigs—the most likely candidate for human replacement tissue, in part because their organs are similar in size—a carbohydrate called α 1,3-galactosyltransferase (gal) on the surface of blood vessel cells would prompt the human body to make antibodies that latch onto it and cause blood clots. Once scientists developed a genetically engineered pig lacking the gal gene in 2001, porcine organs began to survive for months in baboons and other nonhuman primates. But these animals still had to be kept on a drug regimen that protected the foreign organ by suppressing their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to infections.

Simply put – they are having a lot of trouble moving a heart from one type of animal to another.  It takes genetic engineering (modifying the genes of the original animal species – the pig in this case). It also takes a lot of drugs to keep the animal that receives the pig heart alive – in this case the baboons.  And those drugs lead to the baboons dying from infections that have become immune to the antibiotics that are used to try to keep the new heart from being rejected.
In even simpler terms – moving a heart from one type of animal to another leads to all sorts of problems because the heart doesn’t belong in the other animal.
And – in this case, the heart isn’t even functioning as a heart.  The baboons still have their own hearts and the pig hearts beats, with no real purpose other than to beat, in the baboon’s abdomen.

Here’s some shocking news – Genesis 1:24 records five thousand years ago that each animal species is different –

Ge 1:24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

So where does it say it won’t work?  Well, one needs to dig a bit deeper for that.
Let’s look at what the original Hebrew word translated as “kind” actually meant at that time.

4786 מִין (mîn): n.[masc.]; ≡ Str 4327; TWOT 1191a—LN 58.21–58.30 kind, class, species, i.e., a type of entity in contrast to other entities.  ¹Swanson, J. (1997). Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament) (electronic ed.). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

OK – one type of entity – in contrast to other entities.
In other words – they are different entities.

Let’s go a bit further.  What does this mean – an entity in contrast to other entities?

Groups of living organisms belong in the same created “kind” if they have descended from the same ancestral gene pool. This does not preclude new species because this represents a partitioning of the original gene pool. Information is lost or conserved not gained. A new species could arise when a population is isolated and inbreeding occurs. By this definition a new species is not a new “kind” but a further partitioning of an existing “kind”.  ²Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship.

What’s really interesting here is that this additional information about what it means never mentions God!
It talks about descending from the same ancestral gene pool.
It talks about inbreeding.
It talks about new species.
It talks about partitioning a species.
All generic terms that any atheist biologist would use.
Nothing about God.
So it should be very hard for anyone to disagree with this explanation.
And it clearly points out that different “kinds” (species) are – for lack of a better term – different!

Conclusion #1

For the non-believer – the one who doesn’t want to have anything to do with God – even the Biblical explanation of what different “kinds” / different species actually means matches up very well with what they believe. 

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that there are problems. 
It should come as no surprise that one species rejects parts from another different species.

Their goal is supposedly to prolong the lives of humans.
But there are at least a couple of questions to ask:

1. Is it worth the cost?  
   1. Partly in terms of money.  Is there a better use for all the money spent trying to make something that’s against nature happen?  Would it be better to spend that money improving the quality of life for so many in the world who have little to nothing?
   2. What about the suffering of the animals?  They say the baboons don’t die “needlessly” – and yet they do die.  And what about the pigs?  Where do these pig hearts come from?  And what about the gene modifications to those pigs?  How many of them died in the process of experimenting with gene modifications?
2. Is it really about an altruistic goal of extending lives?  Or is it really about trying to be the “god” that they claim doesn’t exist?

Conclusion #2

First of all – the explanations above about different “kinds” still apply.  The only difference for the believer is who gets the credit.  Were all these different kinds just random events and maybe some survival of the fittest?  Or were they guided by God?  The end result is still different kinds.

Next, we have to consider whether or not God intended for us to do things like try to put pig hearts into baboons and people.
Note – this isn’t an issue for non-believers.  They have no such questions, because they don’t believe in God.  But we do – so it must be considered.

One could look at the verse below and assume that yes, God meant for us to do these things –

Ge 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

One could say that ruling over the creatures means that we can do whatever we want.

But that brings to mind another question asked in Genesis –

Ge 3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
Ge 3:2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
Ge 3:4 “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Ge 3:6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Satan asks a question – misleading and incorrect – but a question.
Eve answers – also incorrectly.
Action is taken.
And the mistake is eventually realized.  Too late.

What’s this got to do with pig hearts, baboons and people?

Well – 
yes, God said to rule over the earth, including the creatures.
no – God didn’t say to override His creation of creatures that were of different types / species.
Yes – we will realize our mistake on this as well – but for too many, it will be too late.

How do we know this?

For starters – there’s this –

Ge 3:17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you,
‘You must not eat of it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.

So the ground is cursed – along with us.  Because of us.

In fact, because of that event back in the Garden of Eden – all of creation was cursed –

Ro 8:18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
Ro 8:22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

This was from Paul, in a section of Romans the NIV subtitles “Future Glory”.

Final Conclusion

All of us must make a choice on this.
There’s no “sitting on the fence”.
A choice must be made as to whether this business of taking hearts from one species to put into another is right.

Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should.

Which side of the fence are you on?
Are you part of making God’s creation continue to groan?
Or are you part of wanting God’s creation to reach its future glory – and even move towards it during your life?
Or are you waiting until it’s too late to find out whether or not God’s real?

image from iflscience.com

Footnotes

• 1
  Swanson, J. (1997). Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament) (electronic ed.). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
• 2
  Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship.