Pigs

Sometimes two articles that pop up in the press the same week that, despite the fact that they have nothing to do with each other really, practically beg to read in each other’s light. There was an excellent example of this just last week. Was it synchronicity or mere serendipity? Or am I making something out of nothing? Read on to find out!

Like many of my readers, I’m sure, I was amazed—and thrilled—to read a few weeks ago about the successful transplant at NYU Langone in Manhattan of a kidney grown in a genetically-altered pig into a human being. Everything about the experiment was remarkable. The patient was, other than legally, dead—in other words, possessed of no brain function but still being made to breathe in and out by a ventilator. Normally, the time would have come for the family to make that most awful of decisions: whether to accept that the patient is gone and allow the machine to be turned off, or whether to hold back just a bit longer and hope for a miracle. In this case, though, a third option presented itself when the family was asked if they would agree to allow the doctors to see if a kidney grown in a genetically-altered pig could function well, or at all, in a human being. The patient clearly had nothing to lose. The family agreed. And so, while the ventilator kept the patient breathing, the doctors hooked up the kidney and stepped back to see what would happen.

What happened is as strange as it is miraculous. According to Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, it began to function normally “almost immediately.” And so we had, and for the first time ever, a patient with a functioning kidney that originated in a pig that the scientists had altered genetically to make its organs more compatible with the human body and thus less likely to be rejected. The experiment only went on for 50-odd hours, after which time the ventilator was disconnected and the patient died. But for as long as the patient was alive, the kidney functioned well.

This was a huge breakthrough. (Dr. Dorry Segev, a professor of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins, was quoted in the paper as using that exact expression to describe the success of the operation, adding that this breakthrough was a “big, big deal.” Click here.) I’m hardly a professor of surgery, but even I can see why he would have said that: more than 90,000 Americans are waiting in line for a donor kidney, but there were only 23,401 kidney transplants in 2020. About a dozen people waiting for transplants die daily. But up until now there appeared to be no way around the basic problem that the only source for kidneys was from living or not living human donors…and that there are way too few of such people to provide enough kidneys to go around.

So to centerstage now steps the team from NYU Langone headed by Robert Montgomery to make the remarkable announcement that it could be possible genetically to alter not one or two, but thousands upon thousands of pigs to make their organs more suitable for transplant into human beings. (These pigs could and would be raised for this specific purpose.) Nor are we talking solely about kidneys. Dr. Amy Friedman, chief medical officer of LiveOnNY, an organ procurement organization, was quoted in that same article mentioned above as saying that she could easily imagine using this new procedure to procure new hearts and livers, as well as other organs, for sick people who might not survive without them. We have clearly come a long way from that day in 1984 when Dr. Leonard Baily transplanted the heart of a non-genetically-altered baboon into the chest of the child then known as Baby Fae (her real name was Stephanie Fae Beauclair), who then lived for three weeks—two full weeks longer than any previous recipient of an animal’s heart.

The question of the ethical reasonableness of “using” animals for their functioning organs is a complex one. On the one hand, there is something peculiar about feeling reasonable about raising animals for the slaughter and then eating them, but not about using them to grow organs that can save people’s lives. Nor does it seem all that ethically important that Americans do eat pork but don’t eat baboons or chimpanzees: raising animals at all to serve some human need is the basic question here, but it’s one for which Western culture has a very clear answer. Still, the idea of thinking of animals as boxes of organs instead of as living creatures endowed with their specific version of the dignity that inheres in all life—that doesn’t sit well with me either. And I speak as someone who was the recipient just this last May of a new aortal valve that was once part of an ox. I don’t feel a deep sense of kinship with that ox, although I suppose I harbor a vague sense of gratitude towards that anonymous beast. But the bottom line is still that I cannot see any moral obligation to equate animal life with human life. Killing animals for a legitimate purpose is not murder. Eating meat is not sinful. Using the carcasses of slaughtered animals purposefully is wise, not sinful. Yes, of course, the Torah requires that we only eat certain animals as a way of demonstrating our understanding that the fauna of the world were created by the Creator, who thus had the right to permit us to eat some of them and not others. And it is also true that the ones we do eat have to be slaughtered, because the Torah requires kindness even towards animals, in as painless a way as possible. But the bottom line is that the only way to get that meat is to raise animals for the slaughter and then to kill them, and that is fully countenance by Scripture. For a very interesting essay by my friend, Rabbi Dr. Martin Lockshin, about whether God originally intended for humankind to be vegetarians, click here. But no traditional rabbi, including Rabbi Lockshin, argues seriously that killing animals and eating their meat is a sign of moral depravity. And while the thought that there could some day be no one at all who dies in this country (or anywhere) while waiting for an organ transplant still sounds like an amazingly optimistic fantasy, wouldn’t we have once said the same thing about a dozen other medical advances that we’ve all come to think of as commonplace?

So the other article in the paper that struck me as worth reading against the one about the pig kidney transplant had to do with, of all things, kosher pork. Impossible Foods, the nation’s largest purveyor of plant-based meat substitutes, has perfected and is already marketing a kind of pork substitute that, being made solely of plants, is entirely kosher. Yet the Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certification agency, has declined to grant the product its much-coveted OU certification. The rabbi in charge was quoted in the paper the other day as saying that the product is completely kosher, but that they will nevertheless not certify it as such because they are afraid people will be offended by the idea of kosher pork.

To such people, I reference the story about the kidney transplant. If you were dying of kidney failure and the possibility existed of saving your life with a transplant derived from a genetically-altered pig, my guess is that you’d agree to the operation pretty quickly. And that being the case, there’s probably something morally amiss in being so revolted by pigs that the thought of kosher pork is repellant or disgusting. That regular pork (i.e., the kind not made of plants) isn’t kosher doesn’t mean that pigs aren’t God’s creatures. And that being the case, allowing yourself to be so repulsed by any animal that the thought of a plant-based substitute for its meat being certified as kosher is repugnant—that is a repudiation of the faith in the goodness of Creation that Scripture wishes us all to adopt as a foundation stone of our approach to the world and its things. If the product is made of plants and is kosher, then the OU is behaving—to say the least—mercurially by declining to certify it as kosher. And for all those kosher Jews of whose negative response the OU is so worried, people who presumably can’t imagine why God made pigs in the first place, the team at NYU Langone has produced a pretty satisfying answer.