Two recent cases of hugely costly invasive implantations carried out on single volunteers have ended in setbacks or death. One involved a transplant of a kidney from a genetically modified pig into a human and the other an implant of a Neuralink brain chip.
Before things went wrong, corporate media and corporate science journals hailed the kidney transplant as a success and a beacon of hope for the future. And Elon Musk widely touted the first implant of his brain chip as a success.
There is another pioneering intervention that has also resulted in death – the so-called covid vaccine, which is increasingly looking like genetic implantation. It too has been hailed as a success by corporately funded outlets. However, it is such a harmful and gross failure that even ardent vaccine advocates are now weighing into the debate on our side.
Some People Are Planning a New Future for Us All
You may remember a couple of months ago that a man in the US received a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig. This was the result of years of research and animal genetic modification carried out by multiple teams of researchers at a cost of many billions of dollars.
In late March, the operation was hailed as a success and heralded by the world’s media and scientific journals as a beacon of hope for all people awaiting transplants. The prestigious scientific journal Nature announced it opened the door for an era of xenotransplanted (animal to human) organs.
The recipient, Richard Slayman, died suddenly a few days ago, just five weeks after being pronounced well and being discharged from hospital. His doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital (“MGH”) said on Sunday: “There was no indication his death was a result of the transplant”.
Please forgive my scepticism and crudity, but this reminds me of Peter Sellers as Dr. Clouseau in a lift who creates a bad smell and then leaves someone standing next to him to take the fall.
To add insult to injury, following Mr. Slayman’s death, Joren C. Madsen, Director of the MGH Transplant Centre emphasised the significance of Mr. Slayman’s contribution to medicine saying: “Mr. Slayman becomes a beacon of hope for countless individuals suffering from end-stage renal disease and opens a new frontier in organ transplantation.”
I suppose to say anything else like “We got it wrong” or “We are not sure what went wrong”or “This is a setback for xenotransplantation” or even “Sorry, we overhyped this” might have dried up MGH’s funding.
I think you can see there is nothing routine or even conceivably financially viable about a procedure carried out on one person that absorbs billions of dollars and fails. To say that this will benefit “countless individuals” is just baseless hype. There is currently no basis to suggest that any such procedure will become viable for large numbers of people or more importantly no indication that it can be made to work safely for even one person.
In another billion-dollar misstep, after years of questionable research on animals, a Neuralink implant has mysteriously become detached from the first human patient’s brain.