i’m reading a book about the possibility of using non-human organs for organ transplants, mostly focusing on pig organs, and apparently there’s this whole thing where this one sugar that’s present in the cells that line pig blood vessels is also found in certain bacteria and so it makes the human immune system just go completely fuckin apeshit, to the point where if you hook a pig heart into a human the immune system can destroy it within minutes flat
and it’s like okay that seems like a reasonable fact but then the book goes on to explain that it’s not just pigs, the use of this particular sugar is a basal thing for mammals, and so the only plausible organ source animals that don’t use it are reptiles/birds who never developed it, old-world primates who ditched it after breaking from our new-world cousins… and capybara
just capybara, for no well-explained reason
scifi where replacement organs are grown in vats? out
scifi where people are walking around with capybara hearts? in
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