Making pig livers humanlike in quest to ease organ shortage

The approach is in some ways a compromise to avoid the unexpected difficulties and ethical problems of having animals modified genetically to be donors of organs for human patients, it is obviously not a simple process and it is not sure it will work without further modifications even after the positive preclinical trials results obtained, but it does represent a huge advancement that may lead to a relatively quick solution for the scarcity of organs that cost uncountable lives every year around the globe.

The efforts are also complicated by scandals like the ongoing one of Macchiarini and his stem cell trachea transplants, that brought into the light how unethical doctors can be using preliminary scientific discoveries to put patients at risk, and when discovered can make people (and authorities) reject also those that are acting ethically. This is one of the reasons why trials like the extracorporeal use of the organ are so important, since it can help proving the technique is safe enough to be used on patients without putting them at elevated risk of a fatal complication as a simple transplant could do.

The BBC put out a documentary called Pig Heart Boy about this kind of situation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JoBW_XCWDDA

One of the most intelligent and interesting people I have ever had the pleasure to know has a pigs heart valve. It has to be replaced at roughly ten year intervals however, a real nail biter of an operation. There has apparently been a breakthrough allowing heart valve replacement though a laproscopic procedure, no breaking the chest open, but still a nail biter.

When I was in grad school I paid my way driving fuel tank trucks. One job I had took me to a big campus like building near UCSD that had over a dozen big diesel generators working outside. There was a major failure of a power supply transformer necessitating all the generators. While pumping diesel into their generators I asked an employee what they do. At first he asked "are you squeamish?". "I was in the Navy, nothing freaks me any more" So he told me what they do and the reply stunned me. The were growing sheets of skin that was transplantable to any blood type for burn victims. They used baby foreskins to start the growth. One little foreskin could grow a 400 square foot sheet of skin! Amazing. This was around 1998. The employee told me they were working on growing livers and kidneys using some sort of lattice.

I keep hoping someone will come up with a way to grow replacement cartilage so maybe I can jog again.

Totally irrelevant to what this article is about.

Since you fail to argument how this is the case this is clearly just you trying to impose your personal opinion as if it were fact.

This is the goal. Pure medical use. The medical experts here are not mentioning any "ethical problems"--those stem from your own personal bias.

Medical use do not automatically means the procedures are free from ethical issues, harvesting organs from prisoners is also something done for "pure medical use" but it is also deeply unethical. The example I give is another way to solve the problem but that comes with ethical hurdles that are not easy to solve.

All this has the ring of "The Island of Doctor Moreau" to me...