Lawrence Faucette, the second living person to receive a genetically modified pig heart in a transplant, has died six weeks after the experimental procedure. The University of Maryland Medical Center, where the experimental procedure had been performed, said the heart began to show signs of rejection in recent days.
“Mr. Faucette’s last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience, so others may be guaranteed a chance for a new heart when a human organ is unavailable. He then told the team of doctors and nurses who gathered around him that he loved us. We will miss him tremendously,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, clinical director of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement. Griffith had performed the experimental surgery.
Our bodies are just winging it. It’s both beautiful and goodness and all kinds of other things but it’s a bit philosophical at times.
I had ITP. Autoimmune something which means they don’t know what caused it but my body stopped acknowledging that parts of my blood cell, not the entire one just a piece of it, we’re not me. Of course not me gets flushed out.
But the fancy words for part of a blood cell is called a platelet if you don’t have any platelets you don’t clot. As you can probably pick up not being able to clot is a big problem. I was in danger of bleeding out because my body decided to take out all my platelets.
Seems like an easy problem. If a whole blood cell is me because the DNA matches and all kinds of other things, obviously one cell of me is one cell of me. But if you take one cell of me and you break it up into pieces is it still one cell of me? By definition is not it is 50% of me…
So one cell of me is obviously me and one cell of you is obviously you but what happens when we get into percents at what percent does my cell stop becoming me?